The act/object theory holds that the sensory experience recorded by sentence employing sense is a matter of being directly acquainted with something which actually bears the red to me. I am acquainted with a red expanse (in my visual field): When something tastes bitter to me I am directly acquainted with a sensation with the property of being bitter, and so on and so forth. (If you do not understand the term ‘directly acquainted’, stick a pin into your finger. The relation you will then bear to your pain, as opposed to the relation of concern you might bear to another’s pain when told about it, is an instance e of direct acquaintance e in the intended sense.)


The act/object account of sensory experience combines with various considerations traditionally grouped under the head of the argument for illusion to provide arguments for representative realism, or more precisely for the clause in it that contents that our senorily derived information about the world comes indirectly, that what we are most directly acquainted with is not an aspect of the world but an aspect for our mental sensory responses to it. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned refractive illusion, that of a straight stick in water looking bent. The act/object account holds that in this case we are directly acquainted with a bent shape. This shape, so the argument runs, cannot be the stick as it is straight, and thus, must be a mental item, commonly called a sense-datum. And, ion general sense-data-visual, tactual, etc. ~ is held to be the objects of direct acquaintance. Perhaps the most striking uses of the act/object analysis to bolster representative realism turns on what modern science tell us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. Modern science tells us that the objects of the physical world around us are literally made up of enormously many, widely separated, tiny particles whose nature can be given in terms of a small number of properties like mass, charge, spin and so on. (These properties are commonly called the primary qualities, as primary and secondary qualities represent a metaphysical distinction with which really belong to objects in the world and qualities which only appear to belong to them, or which human beings only believe to belong to them, because of the effects those objects produce ion human beings, typically through the sense organs, that is to say, something that does not hold everywhere by nature, but is producing in or contributed by human beings in their interaction with a world which really contains only atoms of certain kinds in a void. To think that some objects in the world are coloured, or sweet ort bitter is to attribute to objects qualities which on this view they do not actually possess. Rather, it is only that some of the qualities which are imputed to objects, e.g., colour, sweetness, bitterness, which are not possessed by those objects. But, of course, that is not how the objects look to us, not how they present to our senses. They look continuous and coloured. What then, can be these coloured expanses with which we are directly acquainted, be other than mentalistic thoughts of sense-data?

Two objections dominate the literature on representative realism: One goes back to Berkeley (1685-1753) and is that representative realism lead straight to scepticism about the external world, the other is that the act/object account of sensory awareness is to be rejected in favour of an adverbial account.

Traditional representative realism is a ‘veil of perception’ doctrine, in Bennetts (1971) phrase. Lock e’s idea (1632-1704) was that the physical world was revealed by science to be in essence colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent and that we perceive it by, to put it metaphorically, throwing a veil over it by means of our senses. It is the veil we see, in the strictest sense of ‘see’. This does not mean that we do not really see the objects around us. It means that we see an object in virtue of seeing the veil, the sense-data, causally related in the right way to that object, an obvious question to ask, therefore, is what justifies us in believing that there is anything behind the veil, and if we are somehow justified in believing that there is something behind the veil. How can we be confident of what it is like?

One intuition that lies at the heart of the realist’s account of objectivity is that, in the last analysis, the objectivity of a belief is to be explained by appeal to the independent existence of the entities it concerns: Epistemological objectivity, this is, is to b e analysed in terms of ontological notions of objectivity. A judgement or beliefs are epistemological notions of objectivity, if and only if it stands in some specified reflation to an independently existing determinate reality. Frége (1848-1925), for example, believed that arithmetic could comprise objective knowledge only if the numbers it refers to, the propositions it consists of, the functions it employs, and the truth-values it aims at, are all mind-independent entities. And conversely, within a realist framework, to show that the members of a given class of judgements are merely subjective, it is sufficient to show that there exists no independent reality that those judgements characterize or refer to.

Thus, it is favourably argued that if values are not part of the fabric of the world, then moral subjectivity is inescapable. For the realist, the, of epistemological notions of objectivity is to be elucidated by appeal to the existence of determinate facts, objects, properties, events and the like, which exit or obtain independent of any cognitive access we may have to them. And one of the strongest impulses toward platonic realism ~ the theoretical commitment to the existence of abstract objects like sets, numbers, and propositions ~ stems from the widespread belief that only if such things exist in their own right can, we allow that logic, arithmetic and science are indeed objective. Though ‘Platonist’ realism in a sense accounts for mathematical knowledge, it postulates such a gulf between both the ontology and the epistemology of science and that of mathematics that realism is often said to make the applicability of mathematics in natural science into an inexplicable mystery

This picture is rejected by anti-realists. The possibility that our beliefs and theories are objectively true is not, according to them, capable of being rendered intelligible by invoking the nature and existence of reality as it is in and of itself. If our conception of epistemological objective notions is minimal, requiring only ‘presumptive universality’, then alternative, non-realist analysers of it can seem possible ~ and even attractive. Such analyses have construed the objectivity of an arbitrary judgement as a function of its coherence with other judgements, of its possession of grounds that warrant it. Of its conformity to the a prior rules that constitute understanding, of its verifiability (or falsifiability), or if its permanent presence in the mind of God. On e intuitive common to a variety of different anti-realist theories is such that for our assertions to be objective, for our beliefs to comprise genuine knowledge, those assertions and beliefs must be, among other things, rational, justifiable, coherent, communicable and intelligible. But it is hard, the anti-realist claims, to see how such properties as these can be explained by appeal to entities as they are on and of themselves. On the contrary, according to most forms of anti-realism, it is only the basis of ontological subjective notions like ‘the way reality seems to us’, ‘the evidence that is available to us’, ‘the criteria we apply’, ‘the experience we undergo’ or ‘the concepts we have acquired’ that epistemological notions of objectivity of our beliefs can possibly be explained.

The reason by which a belief is justified must be accessible in principle to the subject hold that belief, as Externalists deny this requirement, proposing that this makes knowing too difficult to achieve in most normal contexts. The internalist-Externalists debate is sometimes also viewed as a debate between those who think that knowledge can be naturalized (Externalists) and those who do not (internalist) naturalists hold that the evaluative notions used in epistemology can be explained in terms of non-evaluative concepts ~ for example, that justification can be explained in terms of something like reliability. They deny a special normative realm of language that is theoretically different from the kinds of concepts used in factual scientific discourse. Non-naturalists deny this and hold to the essential difference between normative and the factual: The former can never be derived from or constituted by the latter. So internalists tend to think of reason and rationality as non-explicable in natural, descriptive terms, whereas, Externalists think such an explanation is possible.

Although the reason, . . . to what we think to be the truth. The sceptic uses an argumentive strategy to show the alternatives strategies that we do not genuinely have knowledge and we should therefore suspend judgement. But, unlike the sceptics, many other philosophers maintain that more than one of the alternatives is acceptable and can constitute genuine knowledge. However, it seems dubitable to have invoked hypothetical sceptics in their work to explore the nature of knowledge. These philosophers did no doubt that we have knowledge, but thought that by testing knowledge as severely as one can, one gets clearer about what counts as knowledge and greater insight results. Hence there are underlying differences in what counts as knowledge for the sceptic and other philosophical appearances. As traditional epistemology has been occupied with dissassociative kinds of debate that led to a dogmatism. Various types of beliefs were proposed as candidates for sceptic-proof knowledge, for example, those beliefs that are immediately derive by many as immune to doubt. Nevertheless, that they all had in common was that empirical knowledge began with the data of the senses, that this was safe from scepticism and that a further superstructure of knowledge was to be built on this firm basis.

It might well be observed that this reply to scepticism fares better as a justification for believing in the existence of external objects, than as a justification of the views we have about their nature. It is incredible that nothing independent of us is responsible for the manifest patterns displayed by our sense-data, but granting this leaves open many possibilities about the nature of the hypnotized external reality. Direct realists often make much of the apparent advantage that their view has in the question of the nature of the external world. The fact of the matter is, though, that it is much harder to arrive at tenable views about the nature of external reality than it is to defend the view that there is an external reality of some kind or other. The history of human thought about the nature of the external world is littered with what are now seen (with the benefit of hindsight) to be egregious errors ~ the four element theory, phlogiston, the crystal spheres, vitalism, and so on. It can hardly be an objection to a theory that makes the question of the nature of external reality much harder than the question of its existence.

The way we talk about sensory experience certainly suggests an act/object view. When something looks thus and so in the phenomenological sense, we naturally describe the nature of our sensory experience by saying that we are acquainted with a thus and so ‘given’. But suppose that this is a misleading grammatical appearance, engendered by the linguistic propriety of forming complete, putatively referring expressions like ‘the bent shape on my visual field’, and that there is no more a bent shape in existence for the representative realist to contend to be a mental sense-data, than there is a bad limp in existence when someone has, as we say, a bad limp. When someone has a bad limo, they limp badly, similarly, according to an adverbial theorist, when, as we naturally put it, I am aware of a bent shape, we would better express the way things are by saying that I sense bent shapely. When the act/object theorist analyses as a feature of the object which gives the nature of the sensory experience, the adverbial theorist analyses as a mode of sense which gives the nature of the sensory experience. (The decision between the act/object and adverbial theories is a hard one.)

In the best-known form the adverbial theory of experience proposes that the grammatical object of a statement attributing an experience to someone be analysed as an adverb. For example,

(1) Rod is experiencing a pink square

Is rewritten as? ,

Rod is experiencing (pink square)-ly

This is presented as an alterative to the act/object analysis, according to which the truth of a statement like (1) requires the existence of an object of experience corresponding to its grammatical object. A commitment to the explicit adverbialization of statements of experience is not, however, essential to adverbialism. The core of the theory consisted, rather, in the denial of objects of experience, as opposed to objects of perception, and coupled with the view that the role of the grammatical object is a statement of experience is to characterize more fully the sort of experience which is being attributed to the subject. The claim, then, is that the grammatical object is functioning as a modifier, and, in particular, as a modifier of a verb. If this is so, it is perhaps appropriate to regard it as a special kind of adverb at the semantic level.

Nonetheless, in the arranging accordance to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness in the event of experiencing that object. Such as these experiences are, it is, nonetheless. The experiences are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act, an object theorist may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which h has been treated as properties. However, and, more commonly, private mental objects in which may not exist have any form of being, and, with sensory qualifies the experiencing imagination may walk upon the corpses of times’ generations, but this has also been used as a unique application to is mosaic structure in its terms for objects of sensory experience or the equivalence of the imaginations striving from the mental act as presented by the object and forwarded by and through the imaginistic thoughts that are released of a vexing imagination. Finally, in the terms of representative realism, objects of perception of which we are ‘directly aware’, as the plexuity in the abstract objects of perception exists if objects of experience.

As the aforementioned, traditionally representative realism is allied with the act/object theory. But we can approach the debate or by rhetorical discourse as meant within dialectic awareness, for which representative realism and direct realism are achieved by the mental act in abdication to some notion of regard or perhaps, happiness, all of which the prompted excitation of the notion expels or extractions of information processing. Mackie (1976( argues that Locke (1632-1704) can be read as approaching the debate ion television. My senses, in particular my eyes and ears, ‘tell’ me that Carlton is winning. What makes this possible is the existence of a long and complex causal chain of electromagnetic radiation from the game through the television cameras, various cables between my eyes and the television screen. Each stage of this process carries information about preceding stages in the sense that the way things are at a given stage depends on, and the way things are at preceding stages. Otherwise, the information would not be transferred from the game to my brain. There needs to be a systematic covariance between the state of my brain and the state unless it obtains between intermediate members of the long causal chain. For instance, if the state of my retina did not systematically remit or consign with the state of the television screen before me, my optic nerve would have, so to speak, nothing to go on to tell my brain about the screen, and so in turn would have nothing to go on to tell my brain about the game. There is no information at a distance’.

A few of the stages in this transmission of information between game and brain are perceptually aware of them. Much of what happens between brain and match I am quite ignorant about, some of what happens I know about from books, but some of what happens I am perceptually aware of the images on the scree. I am also perceptually aware of the game. Otherwise, I could not be said to watch the game on television. Now my perceptual awareness of the match depends on my perceptual awareness of the screen. The former goes by means of the latter. In saying this I am not saying that I go through some sort of internal monologue like ‘Such and such images on the screen are moving thus and thus. Therefore, Carlton is attacking the goal’. Indeed, if you suddenly covered the screen with a cloth and asked me (1) to report on the images, and (2) to report in the game. I might well find it easier to report on the game than on the images. But that does not mean that my awareness of the game does not go by way of my awareness of the images on the screen. The shows that I am more interested in the game than in the screen, and so am storing beliefs about it in preference e to beliefs about the screen.

We can now see how elucidated representative realism independently of the debate between act/object and adverbial theorists about sensory experience. Our initial statement of representative realism talked of the information acquired in perceiving an object being most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about objects itself, in the act/object, sense-data approach, what is held to make that true is that the fact that what we are immediately aware of it’s mental sense-datum. But instead, representative realists can put their view this way: Just as awareness of the match game by means of awareness of the screen, so awareness of the screen foes by way of awareness of experience. , And in general when subjects perceive objects, their perceptual awareness always does by means of the awareness of experience.

Why believe such a view? Because of the point that was inferred earlier: The worldly provision by our senses is so very different from any picture provided by modern science. It is so different in fact that it is hard to grasp what might be meant by insisting that we are in epistemologically direct contact with the world.

An argument from illusion is usually intended to establish that certain familia r facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception and called naïve or direct realism. There are, however, many different versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully. Some of these premisses (the nature of the appeal to illusion): Others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion (the kind of direct realism under attack). In distinguishing important differences in the versions of direct realism. One might be taken to be vulnerable to familiar facts about the possibility of perceptual illusion.

A crude statement of direct realism would concede to the connection with perception, such that we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties: We do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-data. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To talk that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-data theorists had better want. At least, many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting too in terms of a technical and philosophical controversial concept such as acquaintance. Using such a notion, we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surfaces, or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious version of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all parts or constituents of physical objects.

We know things by experiencing them, and knowledge of acquaintance. (Russell changed the preposition to ’by’) is epistemically prior to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge about things. Indeed, sensation has ‘the one great value of trueness or freedom from mistake’.

A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing is more or less distant causal y, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a sensation. The things we have knowledge of acquaintance includes ordinary objects in the external world, such as the Sun.

Grote contrasted the imaginistic thoughts involved in knowledge of acquaintance with things, with the judgements involved in knowledge about things, suggesting that the latter but not the former are contentful mental states. Elsewhere, however, he suggested that every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about a thing involves a form, idea, or what we might call conceptual propositional content, referring the thought to its object. Whether contentful or not, thoughts constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as r relatively indistinct, although this indistinctness does not imply incommunicability. Yet, thoughts constituting knowledge about a thing are relatively distinct, as a result of ‘the application of notice or attention’ to the ‘confusion or chaos’ of sensation. Grote did not have an explicit theory of reference e, the relation by which a thought of or about a specific thing. Nor did he explain how thoughts can be more or less indistinct.

Helmholtz (1821-94) held unequivocally that all thoughts capable of constituting knowledge, whether ‘knowledge e’s which has to do with notions’ or ‘mere familiarities with phenomena’ are judgements or, we may say, have conceptual propositional contents. Where Grote saw a difference e between distinct and indistinct thoughts. Helmholtz found a difference between precise judgements which are expressible in words and equally precise judgement which, in principle, are not expressible in words, and so are not communicable.

James (1842-1910), however, made a genuine advance over Grote and Helmholtz by analysing the reference relations holding between a thought and the specific thing of or about which it is knowledge. In fact, he gave two different analyses. On both analyses, a thought constituting knowledge about a thing refers to and is knowledge about ‘a reality, whenever it actually or potentially terminates in’ a thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with that thing. The two analyses differ in their treatments of knowledge of acquaintance. On James’s first analyses, reference in both sorts of knowledge is mediated by causal chains. A thought constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance with a thing refers to and is knowledge of ‘whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles’. The concepts of a thought ‘operating in’ a thing or ‘terminating in’ another thought are causal, but where Grote found chains of efficient causation connecting thought and referent. James found teleology and final causes. On James’s later analysis, the reference involved in knowledge of acquainting e with a thing is direct. A thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as a constituent and the thing and the experiences of it are identical.

James further agreed with Grote that pure knowledge of acquaintance with things, eg., sensory experience, is epistemically prior to knowledge about things. While the epistemic justifications involved in knowledge about all thoughts about things are fallible and their justification is augmented by their mutual coherence. James was unclear about the precise epistemic status of knowledge of acquaintance. At times, thoughts constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance are said to posses ‘absolute veritableness’ and ‘the maximal conceivable truth’, suggesting that such thoughts are genuinely cognitive and that they provide an infallible epistemic foundation. At other times, such thoughts are said not to bear truth-values, suggesting that ‘knowledge’ of acquaintance is not genuine knowledge at all, but only a non-cognitive necessary condition of genuine knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge about things.

What is more that, Russell (1872-1970) agreed with James that knowledge of things by acquaintance ‘is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truth?’. That the mental states involved when one is acquainted with things do not have propositional contents. Russell’s reasons were to seem as having been similar to James’s. Conceptually unmediated reference to particulars is necessary for understanding any proposition mentioning a particular and, if scepticism about the external world is to be avoided, some particulars must be directly perceived. Russell vacillated about whether or not the absence of propositional content renders knowledge by acquaintance incommunicable.

Russell agreed with James that different accounts should be given of reference as it occurs in knowledge by acquaintance and in knowledge about things, and that in the former case reference is direct. But, Russell objected on the number of grounds to James’s causal account of the indirect reference involved in knowledge about things. Russell gave a description al rather than a causal analysis of that sort of reference. A thought is about a thing when the content of the thought involves a definite description uniquely satisfied by the thing referred to. Yet, he preferred to speak of knowledge of things by description, than of knowledge about things.

Russell advanced beyond Grote and James by explaining how thoughts can be more or less articulate and explicit. If one is acquainted with a complex thing without being aware of or acquainted with its complexity, the knowledge one has by acquaintance e with that thing is vague and inexplicit. Reflection and analysis can lead to distinguish constituent parts of the object of acquaintance and to obtain progressively more distinct, explicit, and complete knowledge about it.

Because one can interpret the reflation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not epistemic, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge, it is important to distinguish the views read as ontological theses from a view one might call epistemological direct realism: In perception we are, on, at least some occasions, non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence e of a physical object. A view about what the objects of perceptions are. Direct realism is a type of realism, since it is assumed that these objects exist independently of any mind that might perceive them: And so it thereby rules out all forms of idealism and phenomenalism, which holds that there are no such independently existing objects. Its being a ‘direct realism rules out those views’ defended under the rubic of ‘critical realism’, of ‘representative realism’, in which there is some non-physical intermediary ~ usually called a ‘sense-data’ or a ‘sense impression’ ~ that must first be perceived or experienced in order to perceive the object that exists independently of this perception. According to critical realists, such an intermediary need not be perceived ‘first’ in a temporal sense, but it is a necessary ingredient which suggests to the perceiver an external reality, or which offers the occasion on which to infer the existence of such a reality. Direct realism, however, denies the need for any recourse to mental go-between in order to explain our perception of the physical world.

This reply on the part of the direct realist does not, of course, serve to refute the global sceptic, who claims that, since our perceptual experience could be just as it is without there being any real properties at all, we have no knowledge of any such properties. But no view of perception alone is sufficient to refute such global scepticism. For such a refutation we must go beyond a theory that claims how best to explain our perception of physical objects, and defend a theory that best explains how we obtain knowledge of the world.

All is the equivalent for an external world, as philosophers have used the term, is not some distant planet external to Earth. Nor is the external world, strictly speaking, a world. Rather, the external world consists of all those objects and events which exist external to perceiver. So the table across the room is part of the external world, and so is the room in part of the external world, and so is its brown colour and roughly rectangular shape. Similarly, if the table falls apart when a heavy object is placed on it, the event of its disintegration is a pat of the external world.

One object external to and distinct from any given perceiver is any other perceiver. So, relative to one perceiver, every other perceiver is a part of the external world. However, another way of understanding the external world results if we think of the objects and events external to and distinct from every perceiver. So conceived the set of all perceiver makes up a vast community, with all of the objects and events external to that community making up the external world. Thus, our primary considerations are in the concern from which we will suppose that perceiver is entities which occupy physical space, if only because they are partly composed of items which take up physical space.

What, then, is the problem of the external world. Certainly it is not whether there is an external world, this, and much are taken for granted. Instead, the problem is an epistemological one which, in rough approximation, can be formulated by asking whether and if so how a person gains of the external world. So understood, the problem seems to admit of an easy solution. Thee is knowledge of the external world which persons acquire primarily by perceiving objects and events which make up the external world.

However, many philosophers have found this easy solution problematic. Nonetheless, the very statement of ‘the problem of the external world itself’ will be altered once we consider the main thesis against the easy solution.

One way in which the easy solution has been further articulated is in terms of epistemological direct realism. This theory is the realist insofar as it claims that objects and events in the external world, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceiver and acts of perception in which they engage. And this theory is epistemologically direct since it also claims that in perception people often, and typically acquire immediate non-inferential knowledge of objects and events in the external world. It is on this latter point that it is thought to face serious problems.

The main reason for this is that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-inferentially is claimed that I do not gain immediate non-inferential perceptual knowledge that thee is a brown and rectangular table before me, because I would know such a proposition unless I knew that something then appeared brown and rectangular. Hence, knowledge of the table is dependent upon knowledge of how it appears. Alternately expressed, if there is knowledge of the table at all, it is indirect knowledge, secured only if the proposition about the table may be inferred from propositions about appearances. If so, epistemological direct realism is false’

This argument suggests a new way of formulating the problem of the external world:

:Problem of the external world: Can firstly, have?

knowledge of propositions about objects and events

in the external world based on or upon propositions

which describe how the external world appears,

i.e., upon appearances?

Unlike our original formulation of the problem of the external world, this formulation does not admit of an easy solution. Instead, it has seemed to many philosophers that it admits of no solution at all, so that scepticism regarding the eternal world is only remaining alternative.

This theory is realist in just the way described earlier, but it adds, secondly, that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived, as are many of their features such as their colour, shapes, and textures.

Often perceptual direct realism is developed further by simply adding epistemological direct realism to it. Such an addition is supported by claiming that direct perception of objects in the external world provides us with immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects. Seen in this way, perceptual direct realism is supposed to support epistemological direct realism, strictly speaking they are independent doctrines. One might consistently, perhaps even plausibly, hold one without also accepting the other.

Direct perception is that perception which is not dependent on some other perception. The main opposition to the claim that we directly perceive external objects come from direct or representative realism. That theory holds that whenever an object in the external world is perceived, some other object is also perceived, namely a sensum ~ a phenomenal entity of some sort. Further, one would not perceive the external object if one would not perceive the external object if one were to fail to receive the sensum. In this sense the sensum is a perceived intermediary, and the perception of the external object is dependent on the perception of the sensum. For such a theory, perception of the sensum is direct, since it is not dependent on some other perception, while perception on the external object is indirect. More generally, for the indirect realism. All directly perceived entities are sensum. On the other hand, those who except perceptual direct realism claim that perception of objects in the external world is typically direct, since that perception is not dependent on some perceived intermediaries such as sensum.

It has often been supposed, however, that the argument from illusion suffices to refute all forms of perceptual direct realism. The argument from illusion is actually a family of different arguments rather than one argument. Perhaps the most familiar argument in this family begins by noting that objects appear differently to different observers, and even to the same observers on different occasions or in different circumstances. For example, a round dish may appear round to a person viewing it from directly above and elliptical to another viewing it from one side. As one changes position the dish will appear to have still different shapes, more and more elliptical in some cases, closer and closer to round in others. In each such case, it is argued, the observer directly sees an entity with that apparent shape. Thus, when the dish appears elliptical, the observer is said to see directly something which is elliptical. Certainly this elliptical entity is not the top surface of the dish, since that is round. This elliptical entity, a sensum, is thought to be wholly distinct from the dish.

In seeing the dish from straight above it appears round and it might be thought that then directly sees the dish rather than a sensum. But here too, it relatively sett in: The dish will appear different in size as one is placed at different distances from the dish. So even if in all of these cases the dish appears round, it will; also, appear to have many different diameters. Hence, in these cases as well, the observer is said to directly see some sensum, and not the dish.

This argument concerning the dish can be generalized in two ways. First, more or less the same argument can be mounted for all other cases of seeing and across the full range of sensible qualities ~ textures and colours in addition to shapes and sizes. Second, one can utilize related relativity arguments for other sense modalities. With the argument thus completed, one will have reached the conclusion that all cases of non-hallucinatory perception, the observer directly perceives a sensum, and not an external physical object. Presumably in cases of hallucination a related result holds, so that one reaches the fully general result that in all cases of perceptual experience, what is directly perceived is a sensum or group of sensa, and not an external physical object, perceptual direct realism, therefore, is deemed false.

Yet, even if perceptual direct realism is refuted, this by itself does not generate a problem of the external world. We need to add that if no person ever directly perceives an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-inferential knowledge of such objects. Armed with this additional premise, we can conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects, it is indirect and based upon immediate knowledge of sensa. We can then formulate the problem of the external world in another way:

Problems of the external world: can, secondly? ,

have knowledge of propositions about objects and

events in the external world based upon propositions

about directly perceived sensa?

It is worth nothing the differences between the problems of the external world as expounded upon its first premise and the secondly proposing comments as listed of the problems of the external world, we may, perhaps, that we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world that are inferrable from propositions about appearances.

Some philosophers have thought that if analytical phenomenalism were true, the situational causalities would be different. Analytic phenomenalism is the doctrine that every proposition about objects and events in the external world is fully analysable into, and thus is equivalent in meaning to, a group of inferrable propositions. The numbers of inferrable propositions making up the analysis in any single propositioned object and/or event in the external world would likely be enormous, perhaps, indefinitely many. Nevertheless, analytic phenomenalism might be of help in solving the perceptual direct realism of which the required deductions propositioned about objects and events in the external world from those that are inferrable from prepositions about appearances. For, given analytical phenomenalism there is indefinite many in the inferrable propositions about appearances in the analysis of each proposition taken about objects and events in the external world is apt to be inductive, even granting the truth of a analytical phenomenalism. Moreover, most of the inferrable propositions about appearances into which we might hope to analyse of the external world, then we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world would be complex subjunctive conditionals such as that expressed by ‘If I were to seem to see something red, round and spherical, and if I were to seem to try to taste what I seem to see, then most likely I would seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. But propositionally inferrable appearances of this complex sort will not typically be immediately known. And thus knowledge of propositional objects and event of the external world will not generally be based on or upon immediate knowledge of such propositionally making appearances.

Consider upon the appearances expressed by ‘I seem to see something red, round, and spherical’ and ‘I seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. To infer cogently from these propositions to that expressed by ‘There is an apple before me’ we need additional information, such as that expressed by Apples, generally causes visual appearance of redness, roundness, and spherical shape and gustatory appearance of sweetness and tartness’. With this additional information. , the inference is a good on e, and it is likely to be true that there is an apple there relative to those premiered. The cogency of the inference, however, depends squarely on the additional premise, relative only to the stated inferrability placed upon appearances, it is not highly probable that thee is an apple there.

Moreover, there is good reason to think that analytic phenomenalism is false. For each proposed translation of an object and eventfully external world into the inferrable propositions about appearances. Mainly enumerative induction is of no help in this regard, for that is an inference from premisses about observed objects in a certain set-class having some properties ‘F’ and ‘G’ to unobserved objects in the same set-class having properties ‘F’ and ‘G’, to unobserved objects in the same set-class properties ‘F’ and ‘G’. If satisfactory, then we have knowledge of the external world if propositions are inferrable from propositions about appearances, however, concerned considerations drawn upon appearances while objects and events of the external world concern for externalities of objects and interactive categories in events, are. So, the most likely inductive inference to consider is a causal one: We infer from certain effects, described by promotional appearances to their likely causes, described by external objects and event that profited emanation in the concerning propositional state in that they occur. But, here, too, the inference is apt to prove problematic. But in evaluating the claim that inference constitutes a legitimate and independent argument from, one must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that is so, that a given criterion, simplicities, were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our selves in discovery of an reference to the best explanation.

Defenders of direct realism have sometimes appealed to an inference to the best explanation to justify prepositions about objects and events in the external world, we might say that the best explanation of the appearances is that they are caused by external objects. However, even if this is true, as no doubt it is, it is unclear how establishing this general hypophysis helps justify specific ordination upon the proposition about objects and event in the external world, such as that these particular appearances of a proposition whose inferrable properties about appearances caused by the red apple.

The point here is a general one: Cogent inductive inference from the inferrable proposition about appearances to propositions about objects and events in the external world are available only with some added premiss expressing the requisite causal relation, or perhaps some other premiss describing some other sort of correlation between appearances and external objects. So there is no reason to think that indirect knowledge secured if the prepositions about its outstanding objectivity from realistic appearances, if so, epistemological direct realism must be denied. And since deductive and inductive inferences from appearance to objects and events in the external world are propositions which seem to exhaust the options, no solution to its argument that sustains us of having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe the external world as it appears at which point that is at hand. So unless there is some solution to this, it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take

If the argument leading to some additional premise as might conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects if is directly and based on or upon the immediate knowledge of sensa, such that having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions about directly perceived sensa? Broadly speaking, there are two alternatives to both the perceptual indirect realism, and, of course, perceptual phenomenalism. In contrast to indirect t realism, and perceptual phenomenalism is that perceptual phenomenalism rejects realism outright and holds instead that (1) physical objects are collections of sensa, (2) in all cases of perception, at least one sensa is directly perceived, and, (3) to perceive a physical object one directly perceives some of the sensa which is constituents of the collection making up that object.

Proponents of each of these positions try to solve the conditions not engendered to the species of additional persons ever of directly perceiving an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects in different ways, in fact, if any the better able to solve this additional premise, that we would conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects than related doctrines for which times are aforementioned. The answer has seemed to most philosophers to be ‘no’, for in general indirect realists and phenomenalists have strategies we have already considered and rejected.

In thinking about the possibilities of such that we need to bear in mind that the term for propositions which describe presently directly perceived sensa. Indirect realism typically claims that the inference from its presently directly perceived sensa to an inductive one, specifically a causal inference from effects of causes. Inference of such a sort will perfectly cogent provides we can use a premiss which specifies that physical objects of a certain type are causally correlated with sensa of the sort currently directly perceived. Such a premiss will itself is justified, if at all, solely on the basis of propositions described presently directly perceived sensa. Certainly for the indirect realist one never directly perceives the causes of sensa. So, if one knows that, say, apples topically cause such-and-such visual sensa, one knows this only indirectly on the basis of knowledge of sensa. But no group of propositionally perceived sensa by itself supports any inferences to causal correlations of this sort. Consequently, indirect realists are in no p position to solve such categorically added premises for which knowledge is armed with additional premise, as containing of external objects, it is indirect and based on or upon immediate knowledge of sensa. The consequent solution of these that are by showing that propositions would be inductive and causal inference from effects of causes and show inductively how derivable for propositions which describe presently perceived sensa.

Phenomenalists have often supported their position, in part, by noting the difficulties facing indirect t realism, but phenomenalism is no better off with respect to inferrable prepositions about objects and events responsible for unspecific appearances. Phenomenalism construes physical objects as collections of sensa. So, to infer an inference from effects to causes is to infer a proposition about a collection from propositions about constituent members of the collective one, although not a causal one. Nonetheless, namely the inference in question will require a premise that such-and-such directly perceived sensa are constituents of some collection ‘C’, where ‘C’ is some physical object such as an apple. The problem comes with trying to justify such a premise. To do this, one will need some plausible account of what is mean t by claiming that physical objects are collections of sensa. To explicate this idea, however, phenomenalists have typically turned to analytical phenomenalism: Physical objects are collections of sensa in the sense that propositions about physical objects are analysable into propositions about sensa. And analytical phenomenalism we have seen, have been discredited.

If neither propositions about appearances nor propositions accorded of the external world can be easily solved, then scepticism about external world is a doctrine we would be forced to adopt. One might even say that it is here that we locate the real problem of the external world. ‘How can we avoid being forced into accepting scepticism’?

In avoiding scepticism, is to question the arguments which lead to both propositional inferences about the external world an appearances. The crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon the incorporate perceptual direct realism. To help see that the answer is ‘no’ we may note that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the dish appears elliptical is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is elliptical. But is there an entailment present? Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old’ entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old. And there are countless other examples like this one, where we will resist the inference from a property ‘F’ appearing to someone to claim that ‘F’ is instantiated in some entity.

Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and the like. Such a move, however, requires an arrangement which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might be.

If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing a knowledge of objects and events in the external world primarily by perceiving them. Also, its theory is realist in addition that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived as are many of their characteristic features. Hence, there will no longer be any real motivation for it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take. Of course, even if perceptual directly realism is reinstated, this does not solve, by any means, the main reason for which that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-reference, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. That problem might arise even for one who accepts perceptual direct realism. But, there is reason to be suspicious in keeping with the argument that one would not know that one is seeing something blue if one failed to know that something looked blue. In this sense, there is a dependance of the former on the latter, what is not clear is whether the dependence is epistemic or semantic. It is the latter if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is fort something to look blue. This may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependent relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about how objects appar, but this fact does not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.

Along with ‘consciousness’, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and baring at best problematic relationship to any other events, such as happening in an external world or similar stream of either possessors. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and world, and in spite of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge both ‘idealism’ and ‘scepticism’ are common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing that experience have contents: ‘Content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation has that makes it semantically evaluable. Thus, a statement is something said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content: A term is sometimes said to have a concept as its content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a useful term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have, a representation’s content is just whatever it is that underwrites its semantic evaluation.

A great deal of philosophical effort has been lavished on the attempt to naturalize content, e.g., to explain in non-semantic, non-intentional terms what it is for something to be representation (have ‘content’), and what it is for something to give some particular content than some other. There appear to be only our types of theory that have been proposed: Theories that ground representation in (1) similarity, (2) covariance (3) functional role, and (teleology.

Similarity theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘χ’ in virtue of being similar to ‘χ’. This has seemed hopeless to most as a theory of mental representation because it appears to require that things in the brain must share properties with the thingos they represent: To represent a cat as furry appears to require something furry in the brain. Perhaps, a notion of similarity that is naturalized and does not involve property sharing can be worked out, but it is not obvious how.

Covariance theories hold that r’s representing ‘χ’ is grounded in the fact that r’s occurrence covaries with that of ‘χ’. This is most compelling when one thinks about detection systems: The firing of neural structure in the visual system is said to represent vertical orientations if its firing covaries with the occurrence of vertical lines in the visual field. Dretske (1981) and Fodor (1987) have, in different ways, attempted to promote this idea into a general theory of content.

Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘χ’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘χ’. Teleological theories differ depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps, the most important distinction is that between historical theories and functions, as historical theories individuate functional states, hence content, in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘χ’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘χ’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical stares being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘χ’ according to historical theories.

Theories of representational content may be classified according to whether they are atomistic or holistic and according to whether they are externalistic or internalistic. Primarily, the alternative was for something expressed or implied by the intendment for integrating the different use of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalisms’ has to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined: According to an internalist view of content, the content of such intentional states depend’s only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individual’s mind or brain, and not at all on his physical and social environment. While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors.

As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalisms derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, etc., that motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief of thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment -, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatorial criteria employed by the experts in his social group etc. ~ not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.

An objection to externalist accounts of content is that to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors ~ which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.

The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist way: If part or all of the justification in which if only part of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else, but such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.

Atomistic theories take a representation’s content to be something that representation’s relation to other representations. What Fodor (1987) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a
cow
~ a mental representation with the same content as the word ‘cow’ ~ if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how
cow
’s must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrast with atomistic theories in taking the relations a representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a
cow
if it behaves like a
cow
behave in inference.

Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls ‘short-armed’ functional role theories are internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as teleological theories that invoker an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by ‘external’ factors. Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories, following Burge, 1979) have the consequence that molecule for molecule identical cognitive systems might yet harbor representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning ‘narrow’ content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then contents is, in the first instance ‘wide’ content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attached to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce ‘narrow’ content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent in internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor’s idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contexts (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.



The actions made rational by content-involving states are actions individuated in part by reference to the agent’s relations to things and properties in his environment, wanting to see a particular movie and believing that building over there is a cinema showing it makes rational the action of walking in the direction of that building. Similarly, for the fundamental case of a subject who has knowledge about his environment, a crucial factor in masking rational the formation of particular attitudes is the way the world is around him. One may expect, then, that any theory that links the attributing of contents to states with rational intelligibility will be committed to the thesis that the content of a person’s states depends in part upon his relations to the world outside him we can call this thesis of externalism about content.

Externalism about content should steer a middle course. On the one hand, the relations of rational intelligibility involve not just things and properties in the world, but the way they are presented for being ~ an externalist should use some version of Frége’s notion of a mode of presentation. Moreover, many have argued that there exists its ‘sense’, or ‘mode of presentation’ (something ‘intention’ is used as well). After all, ‘is an equiangular triangle and is an equilateral triangle, pick out the same things not only in the actual world, but in all possible worlds, and so refer ~ insofar as to the same extension, same intension and (arguably from a causal point of view) the same property, but they differ in the way these referents are presented to the mind. On the other hand, the externalist for whom considerations of rational intelligibility are pertinent to the individuation =of content is likely to insist that we cannot dispense with the notion of something in the world ~ an object, property or relation ~ being presented in a certain way, if we dispense with the notion of something external being presented in a certain way, we are in danger of regarding attributions of content as having no consequences for how an individual relates to his environment, in a way that is quite contrary to our intuitive understanding of rational intelligibility.

Externalism comes in more and less extreme versions: Consider a thinker who sees a particular pear, and thinks a thought ‘that pear is ripe’, where the demonstrative way of thinking of the pear expressed by ‘that pear’ is made available to him by his perceiving the pear. Some philosophers, including Evans (1982) and McDowell (1984), have held that the thinker would be employing a different perceptually. Based way of thinking were he perceiving a different pear. But externalism need not be committed to this, in the perceptual state that makes available the way of thinking, the pear is presented for being in a particular direction from the thinker, at a particular distance, and as having certain properties. A position will still be externalist if it holds that what is involved in the pear’s being so presented is the collective role of these components of content in making intelligible in various circumstances the subject’s relations to environmental directions, distances and properties of objects. This can be held without commitment to the object-dependence of the way of thinking expressed by ‘that pear’. This less strenuous form of externalism must, though, addressed the epistemological argument offered in favour of the more extreme versions, to the effect that only they are sufficiently world-involving.

Externalism about content is a claim about dependence, and dependence comes in various kinds. The apparent dependence of the content of beliefs on factors external to the subject can be formulated as a failure of supervenience of belief content upon facts about what is the case within the boundaries of the subject’s body. In epistemology normative properties such as those of justification and reasonableness are often held to be supervening on the class of natural properties in a similar way. The interest of supervenience is that it promises a way of trying normative properties closely to natural ones without exactly reducing them to natural ones: It can be the basis of a sort of weak naturalism. This was the motivation behind Davidson’s (1917-2003) attempt to say that mental properties supervene into physical ones ~ an attempt which ran into severe difficulties. To claim that such supervenience fails is to make a modal claim: That there can be two persons the same in respect of their internal physical states (and so in respect to those of their disposition that are independent of content-involving states), who nevertheless differ in respect of which beliefs there have. Putnam’s (1926- ) celebrated example of a community of Twin Earth, where the water-like substance in lakes and rain is not H2O, but some different chemical compound XYZ ~ ‘water’ ~ illustrates such failure of supervenience. A molecule-for-molecule replica of you on twin earth has beliefs to the effect that ‘water’ is thus-and-so. Those with any chemical beliefs on twin earth may well not have any beliefs to the effect that water is thus-and-so, even if they are replicas of persons on earth who do have such beliefs. Burge emphasized that this phenomenon extends far beyond beliefs about natural kinds.

In the case of content-involving perceptual states, it is a much more delicate matter to argue for the failure of supervenience, the fundamental reason for this is that attribution of perceptual content is answerable not only to factors on the input side ~ what in certain fundamental cases causes the subject to be in the perceptual state ~ but also to factors on the output side ~ what the perceptual state is capable of helping to explain amongst the subject’s actions. If differences in perceptual content always involve differences in bodily described actions in suitable counterfactual circumstances, and if these different actions always have distinct neural bases, perhaps, there will after all be supervenience of content-involving perceptual states on internal states

This connects with another strand in the abstractive imagination, least of mention, of any thinker who has an idea of an objective spatial world ~ an idea of a world of objects and phenomena which can be perceived but which are not dependent upon being perceived for their existence ~ must be able to think of his perception of the world as being simultaneously due to his position in the world, and to the condition of the world at that position. The very idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world brings with it the idea of the subject as being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. That also, of perception it is highly relevant to his psychological self-awareness to have of oneself as a perceiver of the environment.



However, one idea that has in recent times been thought by many philosophers and psychologists alike to offer promise in the connection is the idea that perception can be thought of as a species of information-processing, in which the stimulation of the sense-organs constitutes an input to subsequent processing, presumably of a computational form. The psychologist J.J. Gibson suggested that the senses should be construed as systems the function of which is to derive information from the stimulus-array, as to ‘hunt for’ such information. He thought, least of mention, that it was enough for a satisfactory psychological theory of perception that his logical theory of perception that his account should be restricted to the details of such information pick-up, without reference to other ‘inner’ processes such as concept-use. Although Gibson has been very influential in turning psychology away from the previously dominant sensation-based framework of ideas (of which gestalt psychology was really a special case), his claim that reliance on such a notion of information is enough has seemed incredible to many. Moreover, its notion of ordinary one to warrant the accusation that it presupposes the very idea of, for example, concept-possession and belief that implicates the claim to exclude. The idea of information espoused bu Gibson (though it has to be said that this claim has been disputed) is that of ‘information about’, not the technical one involved in information theory or that presupposed by the theory of computation.

There are nevertheless important links between these diverse uses, however, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and can never observe anything but the perception. However, the idea is that specifying the content of as perceptual experience involves saying what ways of filling out a space around the origin with surfaces, solids, textures, light and so forth, are consistent with the correctness or veridicality of the experience. Such contents are not built from propositions, concepts, senses or continuants of material objects.

Where the term ‘content’ was once associated with the phrase ‘content of consciousness’ to pick out the subjective aspects of mental states, its use in the phrase ‘perceptual content’ is intended to pick out something more closely akin to its old ‘form’ the objective and publicly expressible aspects of mental states. The content of perceptual experience is how the world is represented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as much as such a theory of perception can be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception. What relation is there between the content of a perceptual state and conscious experience? One proponent of an intentional approach to perception notoriously claims that it is ‘nothing but the acquiring of true or false beliefs concerning the current state of the organism’s body or environment, but the complaint remains that we cannot give an adequate account of conscious perception, given the ‘nothing but’ element of this account. However, an intentional theory of perception need not be allied with any general theory of ‘consciousness’, one which explains what the difference is between conscious and unconscious states. If it is to provide an alternative to a sense-data theory, the theory need only claim that where experience is conscious. Its content is constitutive, at least in part, of the phenomenological character of that experience. This claim is consistent with a wide variety of theories of consciousness, even the view that no account can be given.

An intentional theory is also consistent with either affirming or denying the presence of subjective features in experience. Among traditional sense-data theorists of experience. H.H. Price attributed in addition an intentional content to perceptual consciousness. Whereby, attributive subjective properties to experience ~ in which case, labelled sensational properties, in the qualia ~ as well as intentional content. One might call a theory of perception that insisted that all features of what an experience is like ae determined by its intentional content, a purely intentional theory of perception.

Mental events, states or processes with content include seeing the door is shut, believing you are being followed and calculating the square root of 2. What centrally distinguishes states, events or processes ~ henceforth, simply stares ~ with content is that they involve reference to objects, properties or relations. A mental state exists a specific condition for a state with content a specific condition for a state with content to refer to certain things. When the state has correctness or fulfilment by whether its referents have the properties the content specifies for them.

This highly generic characteristic of content permits many subdivisions. It does not in itself restrict contents to conceptualized content, and it permits contents built from Frége’s sense as well as Russellian contents built from objects and properties. It leaves open the possibility that unconscious states, as well as conscious states, have contents. It equally, allows the states identified by an empirical computational psychology to have content. A correct philosophical understanding of this general notion of content is fundamental not only to the philosophy of mind and psychology, but also to the theory of knowledge and to metaphysics.

Perceptions make it rational for a person to form corresponding beliefs and make it rational to draw certain inferences. Belief s and desire s make rational the formation of particular intentions, and the performance o the appropriate actions. People are frequently irrational of course, but a governing ideal of this approach is that for any family of content, there is some minimal core of rational transition to or from states involving them, a core that a person must respect if his states are to be attributed with those contents of all rational interpretative relations. To be rational, a set of beliefs, desires, and actions as well s perceptions, decisions must fit together in various ways. If they do not, in the extreme case they fail to constitute a mind at all ~ no rationality, no agent. This core notion of rationality in philosophy f mind thus concerns a cluster of personal identity conditions, that is, holistic coherence requirements upon the system of elements comprising a person’s mind, it is as well as in philosophy where it is often succumbing to functionalism about content and meaning appears to lead to holism. In general, transitions between mental states and between mental states and behaviour depend on the contents of the mental states themselves. In consideration that I infer from sharks being in the water to the conclusion that people shouldn’t be swimming. Suppose I first think that sharks are dangerous, but then change my mind, coming to think that sharks are not dangerous. However, the content that the first belief affirms can’t be the same as the content that the second belief denies, because the transition relations, e.g., the inference form sharks being in the water to what people should do, so, I changed mt mind functionalist reply is to say that some transitions are relevant to content individuation, whereby others are not. Appeal to a traditional analytic clear/synthetic distinction clearly won’t do. For example, ‘dogs’ ‘and cats’ would have the same content on such a view. It could not be analytic that dogs bark or that cats meow, since we can imagine a non-barking breed of dog and a non-meaning breed of cat. If ‘Dogs are animals’ is analytic, as ‘Cats are animals’. If ‘Cats are adult puppies ‘. Dogs are not cats ~ but then cats are not dogs. So a functionalist’s account will not find traditional analytic inferences of ‘dogs’ from the meaning of ‘cat’. Other functionalist accept holism for ‘narrow content’, attempting to accommodate intuitions about the stability of content be appealing too wide content.

Within the clarity made of inference it is unusual to find it said that, an inference is a (perhaps very complex) act of thought by virtue of which act (1) I pass from a set of one or more propositions or statements to a proposition or statement and (2) it appears that the latter is true in the former is or are. This psychological characterization has occurred widely in the literature under more of less inessential variations.

It is natural to desire a better characterization of inference, but attempts to do so by construing a fuller psychological explanation fail to comprehend the grounds on which inference will be objectively valid ~ a point elaborated made by Gottlob Frége. And attempts to a better understand the nature about inference through the device of the representation of inference by formal-logical calculations to the informal inference they are supposed to represent or reconstruct, and (2) leaves us worried about the sense of such formal derivation. Are these derivations inferences? And aren’t informal inferences needed in order to apply the rules governing the constructions of forma derivation (inferring that this operation is an application of that formal rule)? These are concerns cultivated by, for example, of Wittgenstein. That, insofar as coming up with a good and adequate characterization of inference ~ and even working out what would count as a good and adequate characterization ~ is a hard and by no means nearly solved philosophical problem.

It is still, of ascribing states with content to an actual person has to proceed simultaneously with attribution of a wide range of non-rational states and capacities. In general, we cannot understand a person’s reasons for acting as he does without knowing the array of emotions and sensations to which he is subject: What he remembers and what he forgets, an how he reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which play a fundamental role in individuating content, cannot be understood purely in terms relating to minimal rationality. A perception of the world as being a certain way is not (and could not be) under a subject’s rational control. Though it is true and important that perceptions give for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reason ~ observational beliefs about the environment ~ have contents which can only be elucidated by inferring which can only be elucidated by inferring back to perceptual experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states defer from those beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning what they provide reasons for judging or doing: For frequently these latter judgements and actions can be individuate without reference back to the states that provide reasons for them.

What is the significance for theories of content to the fact that it is almost certainly adaptive for members of a species to have a system of states with representational content which are capable of influencing their actions which are capable? According to teleological theories of content, a constitutive account of content ~ one which says what it is for a state to have a given content ~ must make use of the notions of natural function and teleology. The intuitive idea is that for a belie f state to have a given content ‘p’ is for the belief-forming mechanism which produced it to have the function (perhaps derivatively) of producing that state only when it is the case that ‘p’. But if content itself proves to resist elucidation in terms of natural function and selection, it is still a very attractive view that selection must be mentioned ~ such as a sentence ~ with a particular content, even though that content itself may be individuated by other means.

Contents are normally specified by ‘that . . .’ clauses, and it is natural to suppose that a content has the same kind of sequential and hierarchical structure as the sentence that specifies it. This supposition would by widely accepted for conceptual content. It is, however, a substantive thesis that all content is conceptual. One way of treating one sort of perceptual content is to regard the content as determined by a spatial type, the type under which the region of space around the perceiver must fall if the experience with that content is to represent the environment correctly. The type involves a specification of surfaces and features in the environment, and their distances and direction from the perceiver’s body as origin. Supporters of the view that the legitimacy of using these spatial types in giving the content of experience does not undermine the thesis that all content is conceptual, such supporters will say that the spatial type is just a way of capturing what can equally be captured by conceptual components such as ‘that distance’, or ‘that direction’, where these demonstratives are made available by the perception in question.

In specifying representative realism the significance this theory holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of it, (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, and (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself. Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘independently aware’) are always distinct from objects of experience (of which we are ‘directly aware’) Meinongians, however, may simply that object of perception as existing objects of experience.

Armstrong (1926- ) not only sought to explain perception without recourse to sense-data or subjective qualities but also sought to equate the intentionality of perception with that of belief. There are two aspects to this: the first is to suggest that the only attitude toward a content involved in perception is that of believing, and the second is to claim that the only content involved in perceiving is that which a belief may have. The former suggestion faces an immediate problem, recognized by Armstrong, of the possibility of having a perceptual experience without acquiring the correspondence belief. One such case is where the subject already possesses the requisite belief ~ rather than leading to the acquisition of, belief. The more problematic case is that of disbelief in perception. Where a subject has a perceptual experience but refrains from acquiring the correspondence belief. For example, someone familiar with Muller-Lyer illusion, in which lines of equal length appear unequal, is likely to acquire the belief that the lines are unequal on encountering a recognizable example of the illusion. Despite that, the lines may still appear unequal to them.

Armstrong seeks to encompass such cases by talk of dispositions to acquire beliefs and talk of potentially acquiring beliefs. On his account this is all we need say to the psychological state enjoyed. However, once we admit that the disbelieving perceivers still enjoys a conscious occurrent experience, characterizing it in terms of a disposition to acquire a belief seems inadequate. There are two further worries. One may object that the content of perceptual experiences may play a role in explaining why a subject disbelievers in the first place: Someone may fail to acquire a perceptual belief precisely because how things appear to her is inconsistent with her prior beliefs about the world. Secondly, some philosophers have claimed that there can be perception without any correspondence belief. Cases of disbelief in perception are still examples of perceptual experience that impinge on belief: Where a sophisticated perceiver does not acquire the belief that the Müller-Lyer lines are unequal, she will still acquire a belief about how things look to her. Dretske (1969) argues for a notion of non-epistemic seeing on which it is possible for a subject to be perceiving something whole lacking any belief about it because she has failed to notice what is apparent to her. If we assume that such non-epistemic seeing, nevertheless, involves conscious experience e it would seem to provide another reason to reject Armstrong’s view and admit that if perceptual experiences are intentional states then they are a distinct attitude-type from that of belief. However, even if one rejects Armstrong’s equation of perceiving with acquiring beliefs or disposition to believe, one may still accept that he is right about the functional links between experience and belief, and the authority that experience has over belief, an authority which, can nevertheless be overcome.

It is probably true that philosophers have shown much less interest in the subject of the imagination during the last fifteen tears or so than in the period just before that. It is certainly true that more books about the imagination have been written by those concerned with literature and the arts than have been written by philosophers in general and by those concerned with the philosophy of mind in particularly. This is understandable in that the imagination and imaginativeness figure prominently in artistic processes, especially in romantic art. Still, those two high priests of romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge, made large claims for the role played by the imagination in views of reality, although Coleridge’s thinking on this was influenced by his reading of the German philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly Kant and Schelling. Coleridge distinguished between primary and secondary imagination, both of them in some sense productive, as opposed too merely reproductive. Primary imagination is involved in all perception of the world in accordance with a theory which, as Coleridge derived from Kant, while secondary imagination, the poetic imagination, is creative from the materials that perception provides. It is this poetic imagination which exemplifies imaginativeness in the most obvious way.

Being imaginative is a function of thought, but to use one’s imagination in this way is not just a matter of thinking in novel ways. Someone who, like Einstein for example, presents a new way of thinking about the world need not be by reason of this supremely imaginative (though of course, he may be). The use of new concepts or a new way of using already existing concepts is not in themselves an exemplification of the imagination. What seems crucial to the imagination is that it involves a series of perspectives, new ways of seeing things, in a sense of ‘seeing’ that need not be literal. It thus involves, whether directly or indirectly, some connection with perception, but in different ways. To make clear in the similarities and differences between seeing proper and seeing with the mind’s eye, as it is sometimes put. This will involve some consideration of the nature and role of images, least of mention, that there is no general agreement among philosophers about how to settle neurophysiological problems in the imagery of self.

Connections between the imagination and perception are evident in the ways that many classical philosophers have dealt with the imagination. One of the earliest examples of this, the treatment of ‘phantasia’ (usually translated as ‘imagination’) in Aristotles ‘De Anima III. 3. seems to regard the imagination as a sort of half-way house between perception and thought, but in a way which makes it cover appearances in general, so that the chapter in question has as much to do with perceptual appearances, including illusions, as it ha s to do with, say. Imagery. Yet, Aristotle also emphasizes that imagining is in some sense voluntary, and that when we imagine a terrifying scene we are not necessarily terrified, any more than we need be when we see terrible things in a picture. How that fits in with the idea that an illusion is or can be a function of the imagination is less than clear. Yet, some subsequent philosophers, Kant on particular. Followed in recent times by P.F. Strawson have maintained that all perception involves the imagination, in some sense of that term, in that some bridge is required between abstract thoughts and their perceptual instance. This comes out in Kant’s treatment of what he calls the ‘schematism’, where he rightly argues that someone might have an abstractive understanding of the concept of a dog without being able to recognize or identify any dogs. It is also clear that someone might be able to classify all dogs together without any understanding of what a dog is. The bridge that needs to be provided to link these two abilities Kant attributes to the imagination.

In so arguing Kant goes, as he so often does, beyond Hume who thought of the imagination in two connected ways. Firs t, there is the fact that there exist. Hume thinks, ideas which are either copies of impressions provided by the senses or derived from these. Ideas of imagination are distinguished from those of memory, and both of these from impression and sense, by their lesser vivacity. Second, the imagination is involved in the processes, mainly associated of ideas, which take one form on ideas to another, and which Hume uses to explain, for example, our tendency to think of objects as having no impression on them, ideas or less images, is the mental process which takes one from one idea to another and thereby explains our tendency to believe things go beyond what the senses immediately justify. The role which Kant gives to the imagination in relation to perception in general is obviously a wider and fundamental role than that Hume allows. Indeed, one might take Kant to be saying that were there not the role that he, Kant insists on there would be no place for the role which Hume gives it. Kant also allows for a free use of the imagination in connection with the arts and the perceptions of beauty, and this is a more specified role than that involved in perception overall.

In the retinal vision by the seeing of things we normally see them as such-and-such, is to be construed and in how it relate s to a number of other aspects of the mind ‘s functioning ~ sensation, concept and other things of other aspects of the mind’s functioning ~ sensation, concepts, and other things involved in our understanding of things, belief and judgement, the imagination, our action is related to the world around us, and the causal processes involved in the physics, biology and psychology of perception. Some of the last were central to the considerations that Aristotle raised about perception in his ‘De Anima’.

Nevertheless, there are also special, imaginative ways of seeing things, which Wittgenstein (1889-1951) emphasized in his treatment of ‘see-as’ in his ‘Philosophical Investigations II. Xi. And on a piece paper as standing up, lying down, hanging from its apex and so on is a form of ‘seeing-as’ which is both more special and more sophisticated than simply seeing it as a triangle. Both involve the application of concepts to the objects of perception, but the way in which this is done in the two cases is quite different. One might say that in the second case one has to adopt a certain perceptive, a certain point of view, and if that is right it links up with what had been said earlier about the relation and difference between thinking imaginatively and thinking in novel ways.

Wittgenstein (1953) used the phrase ‘an echo of a thought is sight’ in relation to these special ways of seeing things, which he called ‘seeing aspects’. Roger Scruton has spoken of the part played in it all by ‘unasserted thought’, but the phrase used by Wittgenstein brings out more clearly one connection between thought and a form of sense-perception. Wittgenstein *1953) also compares the concepts of an aspect and that of seeing-as with the concept of an image, and this brings out a point about the imagination that has not been much evident in what has been said so far ~ that imagining something is typically a matter of picturing it in the mind and that this involves images in some way, however, the picture view of images has come under heavy philosophical attack. First, there have been challenges to the sense of the view: Mental images are not with real eyes: They cannot be hung on real walls and they have no objective weight or colour. What, the, can it mean to say, that images are pictorial? Secondly, there have been arguments that purport to show that the view is false. Perhaps, the best known of these is founded on the charge that the picture theory cannot satisfactorily explain the independency of many mental images. Finally, there have been attacks on the evidential underpinning of the theory. Historically, the philosophical claim that images are picture-like rested primarily on an appeal to introspection. And today less about the mind than was traditionally supposed. This attitude toward introspection has manifested itself in the case of imagery in the view that what introspection really shows about visual images is not that they are pictorial but only that what goes on in imagery is experimentally much like what goes on in seeing. This aspect is crucial for the philosophy of mind, since it raises the question of the status of images, and in particular whether they constitute private objects or stares in some way. Sartre (1905-80), in his early work on the imagination emphasized, following Husserl (1859-1938), that images are forms of consciousness of an object, but in such a way that they ‘present’ the object as not being: Wherefore, he said, the image ‘posits its object as nothingness’, such a characterization brings out something about the role of the form of consciousness of which the having of imagery may be a part, in picturing something the images are not themselves the object of consciousness. The account does less, however, to bring out clearly just what images are or how they function.

As part of an attemptive grappling about the picturing and seeing with the mind’s eye, Ryle (1900-76 ), has argued that in picturing, say, Lake Ontario, in having it before the mind’s eye, we are not confronted with a mental picture of Lake Ontario: Images are not seen. We nevertheless, can ‘see’ Lake Ontario, and the question is what this ‘seeing’ is, if it is not seeing in any direct sense. One of the things that may make this question difficult to answer is the fact that people’s images and their capacity for imagery vary, and this variation is not directly related to their capacity for imaginativeness. While an image may function in some way as a ‘presentation’ in a train of imaginative thought, such thought does not always depend on that: Images may occur in thought which are not really representational at all, are not, strictly speaking, ‘of’ anything. If the images are representational, can one discover things from one’s images that one would not know from otherwise? Many people would answer ‘no’, especially if their images are generally fragmentary, but it is not clear that this is true for everyone. What is more, and this affects the second point, fragmentary imagery which is at best ancillary to process of though in which it occurs may not be in any obvious sense representational, even if the thought itself is ‘of’ something.

Another problem with the question what it is to ‘see’ Lake Ontario with the mind’s eye is that the ‘seeing’ in question may or may not be a direct function of ‘memory’. For one who has seen Lake Ontario, imaging it may be simply a matter of reproduction in some form in the original vision, and the vision may be reproduced unintentionally and without any recollection of what it is a ‘vision’ of. For one who has never been it the task of imagining it depends most obviously on the knowledge of what sort of thing Lake Ontario is and perhaps on experiences which are relevant to that knowledge. It would be surprising, to say the least, if imaginative power could produce a ‘seeing’ that was not constructed from any previous seeing. But that the ‘seeing’ is not itself a seeing in the straightforward sense is clear, and on this negative point what Ryle says, and other s have said, seems clearly right. As to what ‘seeing’ is in a positive way, Ryle answers that it involves fancying something and that this can be assimilated to pretending. Fancying that one is seeing Lake Ontario is thus, at least, like pretending that one is doing that thing. But is it?

Along the same course or lines, there is in fact a great difference between say, imaging that one is a tree and pretending to be a tree. Pretending normally involves doing something, and even when there is no explicit action on the part of the pretender, as when he or she pretends that something or other is the case, there is at all events an implication of possible action. Pretending to be a tree may involve little more that standing stock-still with one’s arms spread out like branches. To imagine being a tree (something that is founded that some people deny being possible, which is to my mind a failure of imagination) need imply no action whatever, (Imagining being a tree is different in this respect from imagining that one is a tree, where this means believing falsely, that one is a tree, one can imagine being a tree without this committing one to any beliefs on that score). Yet, of imagining being a tree does seem to involve adopting the hypothetical perspective of a tree, contemplating perhaps, that it is like to be a fixture in the ground with roots growing downward and with branches (somewhat like arms) blown by the wind and with birds perching on them.

Imagining something seems in general to involve change of identity on the part of something or other, and in imagining being something else, such as a tree, the partial change of identity contemplated is in oneself. The fact that the change of identity contemplated cannot be completely does not gainsay, the point that it is a change of identity which is being contemplated. One might raise the question whether something about the ‘self’ is involved in all imaginings. Berkeley (1685-17530 even suggests that imagining a solitary unperceived tree involves a contradiction, in that a imagine that is to imagine oneself perceiving it. In fact, there is a difference between imagining a object, solitary or not, and imagining oneself seeing that object. The latter certainly involves putting themselves imaginatively in the situation pictured: The former involves contemplating the object from a point of view that from that point of view which one would oneself have if one were viewing that point of view to which reference has already been made, in a way that clearly distinguishes picturing something from merely thinking of it.

This does not rule out the possibility that an imagine might come into one’s mind which one recognizes as some kind of depiction of a scene. But when actually picturing a scene, it would not be right to say that one imagines the scene by way of a contemplation of an image which plays the part of as picture of it. Moreover, it is possible to imagine a scene without any images occurring, the natural interpretation of which would be that they are pictures of that scene. It is possible for one imagining say, the GTA is to report on request the occurrences of images which are not in any sense pictures of the GTA -, not of that particular city and perhaps not even of a city at all. That would not entail that he or she was not imagining the GTA: A report to or associated with the GTA, thought by others to be of the GTA.

This raises a question which is asked by Wittgenstein (1953) -, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him’? To which Wittgenstein replies ‘Not its looking like him’, and furthering he suggests that a person’s account of what his imagery represents is decisive. Certainly it is so when the process of imagination which involves the imagery is one that the person engages in intentionality. The same is not true, as Wittgenstein implicitly acknowledges in the same context, if the imagery simply comes to mind without there being any intention, in that case, one might not even know what the image is an image of.

Nevertheless, all this complicates the question what the status of mental images is. However, it might seem that they stand in relation to imagining as ‘sensations’ stand to perception, except that the occurrence of sensations is a passive set-organization of specific presentiments, while the occurrence of an image can be intentional, and in the context of an active flight of imagination is likely to be so. Sensations give perceptions a certain phenomenal character, providing they’re sensuous, as opposed to conceptual content. Intentional action has interesting symmetric and asymmetric to perception. Like perceptual experience, the experiential component of intentional action is causally self-referential. If, for example, I can now walking to my car, then the condition of satisfaction of the preset experience is that there be certain bodily movements, and that this very experience of acting cause those bodily movements. Furthering, like perceptual experience, the experience of acting is topically a conscious mental event, is that perception is always concept-dependent at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is, at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something but that are such that the attribution of concepts them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much the objects figure causally in their behaviour. There are, nevertheless, important links between these diverse uses. We might call a theory which attributes to perceptual states as content in the new sense as ‘an intentional theory’ of perception. On such a view, perceptual states represent to the subject how her environment and body are. The content of perceptional experiences is how the world is presented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as such as such a theory of perception can be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception, such will deal with the content of consciousness. The ruminative contemplation, where with concepts looms largely and has, perhaps the overriding role, it still seems necessary for our thought to be given a focus in thought-occurrences such as images. These have sometimes been characterized as symbols which are the material of thought, but the reference to symbols is not really illuminating. Nonetheless, while a period of thought in which nothing of this kind occurs is possible, the general direction of thought seems to depend on such things occurring from time to time. The necessary correlations that are cognizant, insofar as when we get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, thereof: Which of us attribute a necessity to the relation between things of two particular kinds of things. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing on the first sort. That of saying, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is. In the case of the imagination images seem even more crucial, in that without therm it would be difficult, to say, at least, for the point of view or perspective which is important for the imagination to be given a focus.

Of the same lines that it would be difficult for this to be so, than impossible, since it is clear that entertaining a description of a scene, without there being anything that a vision of it, could sometimes give that perceptive. The question still arises whether a description could always do quite what, and an image can do in this respect. The point is connected with an issue over which there has been some argument among psychologists, such as S.M. Kosslyn and Z.W. Pylyshyn, concerning what are termed ‘analogue’ versus ‘propositional’ theories of representation. This is an argument concerning whether the process of imagery is what Pylyshyn (1986) calls ‘cognitively penetrable’, i.e., such that its function is affected by beliefs or other intellectual processes expressible in propositions, or whether, it can be independent of cognitive processes although capable itself of affecting the mental life because of the pictorial nature of images ( the ‘analogue medium’). One example, which has embarked upon that argument, is that in which people are asked whether two asymmetrically presented figures can be made to coincide, the decision on which may entail some kind of material rotation of one or more of the figures. Those defending the ‘analogue’ theory, point to the fact that there is some relation between the time taken and the degree of the rotation required, this suggests that some processes involving changing images is identify with. For some who has little or no imagery this suggestion, may seem unintelligible. Is it enough for one to go through an intellectual working out of the possibilities, as based on features of the figures that are judged relevant? This could not be said to be unimaginative as long as the intellectual process involved reference to perceptive or points of view in relation to the figures, the possibility of which the thinker might be able to appreciate. Such an account of the process of imagination cannot be ruled out, although there are conceivable situations in which the ‘analogue’ process of using images might be easier. Or, at least, it might be easier for those who have imagery most like the actual perception of a scene: For others situation might be difficult.

The extreme of the former position is probably provided by those who have so-called ‘eidetic’ imagery, where having an image of a scene is just like seeing it, and where, if it is a function of memory as it most likely is, it is clearly possible to find out details of the scene imagined by introspection of the image. The opposite extreme is typified by those for whom imagery, to the extent it occurs at all, is at best ancillary to propositionally styled thought. But, to repeat the point made unasserted, will not count as imagination unless it provides a series of perspectives on its object. Because images are or can be perceptual analogues and have a phenomenal character analogous to what sensations provide in perception they are, most obviously suited. In the working of the mind, to the provision of those perspectives. Bu t in a wider sense, imagination enters the picture whenever some link between thought and perception is required, as well as making possible imaginative forms of seeing-as. It may thus justifiably be regarded as a bridge between perception and thought.

The plausibility to have a firm conviction in the reality of something as, perhaps, as worthy of belief and have no doubt or unquestionably understood in the appreciation to view as plausible or likely to apprehend the existence or meaning of comprehensibility whereas, an understandable vocation as to be cognizant of things knowably sensible. To a better understanding, an analogous relationship may prove, in, at least, the explanation for the parallels that obtain between the ‘objects of contents of speech acts’ and the ‘objects or contents of belief’. Furthermore, the object of believing, like the object of saying, can have semantic properties, for example:

What Jones believes is true.

And:

What Jones believes entails, what Smith believes.

One plausible hypophysis, then, is that the object of belief is the same sort of entity as what is uttered in speech acts (or what is written down).

The second theory also seems supported by the argument of which our concerns conscribe in the determination of thought, for which our ability to think certain thoughts appears intrinsically connected with the ability to think certain others. For example, the ability to think that John hit Mary goes hand in hand with the ability to think that Mary hits John, but not with the ability to think that Toronto is overcrowded. Why is this so? The ability to produce or understand certain sentences is intrinsically connected with the ability to produce or understand certain others. For example, there are no native speakers of English who know how to say ‘John hits Mary’, but who do not know how to say ‘Mary hits John’. Similarly, there are no native speakers who understand the former sentence but not the latter. These facts are easily explained if sentences have a syntactic and semantic structure, but if sentences are taken to be atomic, these facts are a complete mystery. What is true for sentences is true also for thoughts. Thinking thoughts involving manipulating mental representations. If mental representations with a propositional content have a semantic and syntactic structure like that of sentences. It is no accident that one who is able to think that John hits Mary is thereby, able to think that Mary hits John. Furthermore, it is no accident that one who can think these thoughts need not thereby be able to think thoughts, having different components ~ for example, the thought that Toronto is overcrowded. And what goes here for thought goes for belief and the other propositional attitudes.

If concepts of the simple (observational) sort were internal physical structures that had in this sense, an information-carrying function, a function they acquired during learning, then instances as such types would have a content that (like a belief) could be either true or false. After learning, tokens of these structure types, when caused by some sensory stimulation, would ‘say’ (i.e., mean) what it was their function to ‘tell’ (inform about). They would therefore, quality as beliefs ~ at least of the simple observational sort.

Any information-carrying structure carries all kinds of information. If, for example, it carriers information ‘A’, it must also carry the information that ‘A’ or ‘B’. As I conceived of it, learning was supposed to be a process in which a single piece if this information is selected for special treatment, thereby becoming the semantic content ~ the meaning ~ of subsequent tokens of that structure type. Just as we conventionally give artefacts and instruments information-providing functions, thereby making their activities and states ~ pointer readers, flashing lights, and so on ~ representations of the conditions, so learning converts neural states that carry information ~ ‘pointers readers’ in the head, so to speak ~ into structures that have the function to providing some vital piece of the information they carry are also presumed to serve as the meanings of linguistic items, underwriting relations of translation, definition, synonymy, antinomy and semantic implications. Much work in the semantics of natural language takes itself to be addressing conceptual structure.

Concepts have also been thought to be the proper objects of ‘philosophical analysis’. ‘Analytic’ philosophers when they ask about the nature of justice, knowledge or piety and expect to discover answers by means of introspective reflection, yet the expectation that one sort of thing could serve all these tasks went hand in hand with what has come to be called the ‘Classical View’ of concepts, according of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for their satisfaction, which are known to any competent user of them, the standard example is the especially simple one [bachelor], which seems to be identified to [eligible unmarried male]. A more interesting, but problematic one has been [knowledge], whose analysis was traditionally thought to be [justified true belief].

The notional representation that treat relations as a subclass of property brings to contrast with property is ‘concept’, but one must be very careful, since ‘concept’, has =been used by philosophers and psychologists to serve many different purposes. One use has it that certain factors of conceiving of some aspect of the world. As such, concepts have a kind of subjectivity as having to contain the different individuals might, for example, have different concepts of birds, one thinking of them primarily as flying creatures and the other as feathered. Concepts in this sense are often described as a species of ‘mental representation’, and as such they stand in sharp contrast to the notion of a property, since a property is something existing in the world. However, it is possible to think of a concept as neither mental nor linguistic and this would allow, though it doesn’t dictate, that concepts and properties are the same kind of thing. Nonetheless, the function of learning is naturally to develop, as things inasmuch as they do, in some natural way, either (in the case of the senses) from their selectional history or (in the casse of thought) from individual learning. The result is a network of internal representations that have, in different ways, the power to represent: Experiences and beliefs.

This does, however, leave a question about the role of the senses in this total cognitive enterprise. If it is learning that, by way of concepts, is the source of the representational powers of thought, from whence comes the representational powers of experience? Or should we even think of experience in representational terms? We can have false beliefs, but are there false experiences? On this account, then, experience and thought are both representational. The difference resides in the source of heir representational powers, learning in the case of thoughts, evolution in the case of experience.

Though, perception is always concept-dependent, at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly in the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something, but that are such that the attribution of concepts to them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much is as there is much that the object figures causally in their behaviour. Moreover, that consciousness presents the object in such a way that the experience has certain phenomenal character, which derived from the sensations which the causal processes involved set up. This is most evident is the case of ‘touch’ (which being a ‘contact sense’ provides a more obvious occasion for speaking of sensations than do ‘distance senses’ such as sight). Our tactual awareness of the texture of a surface is, to use a metaphor, ‘coloured’ by the nature of the sensations that the surface produces in our skin, and which we can be explicitly aware of if our attention is drawn to them (something that gives one indication of how attention too is involved in perception).

It has been argued, that the phenomenal character of n experience is detachable from its contentual content in the sense that an experience of the same phenomenal character could occur even if the appropriate concepts were not available. Certainly the reverse is true ~ that a concept-mediated awareness of an object could occur without any sensation-mediated experience ~ as in an awareness of something absent from us. It is also the case, however, that the look of something can be completely changed by the realization that it is to be seen as ‘χ’ rather than ‘y’. To the extent that, which is so, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience should be viewed as the result of the way in which sensations produced in us by objects blend with our ways of thinking of and understanding those objects (which, it should be noted, are things in the world and should not be confused with the sensations which they produce).

In the study o ff other parts of the natural world, we agree to be satisfied with post-Newtonian ‘best theory’ arguments: There is no privileged category of evidence that provides criteria for theoretical constructions. In the study of humans above the neck, however, naturalistic theory does not suffice: We must seek ‘philosophical explanations’, require that theoretical posits specified terms of categories of evidence selected by the philosopher (as, in the radically upon unformulated notions such as ‘access in principle’ that have no place in naturalistic inquiry.

However, one evaluates these ideas, that clearly involve demands beyond naturalism, hence, a form of methodological/epistemological dualism. In the absence of further justification, it seems to me fair to conclude, that inability to provide ‘philosophical explanation’ or a concept of ‘rule-following’ that relies on access to consciousness (perhaps ‘in principle’) is a merit of a naturalistic approach, not a defect.

A standard paradigm in the study of language, given its classic form by Frége, holds that there is a ‘store of thoughts’ that is a common human possession and a common public language in which these thoughts are expressed. Furthermore, this language is based on a fundamental relation between words and things ~ reference or denotation ~ along with some mode of fixing reference )sense, meaning). The notion of a common public language has never been explained, and seems untenable. It is also far from clear why one should assume the existence of a common store of thoughts: The very existence of thoughts had been plausibly questioned, as a misreading of surface grammar, a century earlier.

Only those who share a common world can communicate, only those who communicate can have the concept of an inter-subjective, objective world. As a number of things follow. If only those who communicate have the concept of an objective world, only those who communicate can doubt whether an external world exists. Yet I is impossible seriously (consistently) to doubt the existence of other people with thoughts, or the existence of an external world, since to communicate is to recognize the existence of other people in a common world. Language, that is, communication with others, is thus essential to propositional thought. This is not because it is necessary to have the words to express a thought (for it is not); it is because the ground of the sense of objectivity is inter-subjectivity, and without the sense of objectivity, of the distinction between true and false, between what is thought to be and what is the case, there can be nothing rightly called ‘thought’.

Since words are also about things, it is natural to ask how their intentionality is connected in that of thoughts. Two views have been advocated: One view takes thought content to be self-subsistent relative to linguistic content, with the latter dependent on or upon the former. The other view takes thought content to be derivative upon linguistic content, so that there can be no thought without a bedrock of language. Appeals to language at this point are apt to founder on circularity, since words take on the powers of concepts only insofar as there express them. Thus, there seems little philosophical illumination to be got from making thought depend upon language. Nonetheless, it is not entirely clear what it amounts to assert or deny, that there is an inner language of thought. If it means merely that concepts (thought-constituents) are structured in such a way as to be isomorphic with spoken language, then the claim is trivially true, given some natural assumption. But if it means that concepts just are ‘syntactic’ items orchestrated into strings of the same, then the claim is acceptable only in so far as syntax is an adequate basis for meaning ~ which, on the face of it, it is not. Concepts n doubt have combinatorial powers comparable to those of words, but the question is whether anything else can plausibly be meant by the hypothesis of an inner language.

Yet, it appears undeniable that the spoken language does not have autonomous intentionality, but instead derives its meaning from the thoughts of speakers ~ though language may augment one’s conceptual capacities. So thought cannot post-date spoken language. The truth seems to be that in human psychology speech and thought are interdependent in many ways, but that there is no conceptual necessity about this. The only ‘language’ on which thought essentially depends is that of the structured system of concepts itself: Thought depends on or upon there being isolable concepts that can join with others to produce complete propositions. But this is merely to draw attention to a property of any system of concepts must have; it is not to say what concepts are or how they succeed in moving between thoughts as they do.

Finally, there is the old question of whether, or to what extent, a creature who does not understand a natural language can have thoughts. Now it seems pretty compelling that higher mammals and humans raised without language have their behaviour controlled by mental states that are sufficiently like our beliefs, desires and intentions to share those labels. It also seems easy to imagine non-communicating creatures who have sophisticated mental lives (they build weapons, dams, bridges, have clever hunting devices, etc.). at the same time, ascriptions of particular contents to non-language-using creatures typically seem exercises in loose speaking (does the dog really believe that there is a bone in the yard?), and it is no accident that, as a matter of fact, creatures who do not understand a natural language have at best primitive mental lives. There is no accepted explanation of these facts. It is possible that the primitive mental failure to master natural languages, but the better explanation may be Chomsky’s, that animals lack a special language faculty to our species, as, perhaps, the insecurity that is felt, may at best resemble the deeper of latencies that cradles his instinctual primitivities, that have contributively distributed the valuing qualities that amount in the result to an ‘approach-avoidance’ theory. As regards the wise normal human raised without language; this might simply be due to the ignorance and lack of intellectual stimulation such a person would be predetermined to. It also might be that higher thought requires a neural language with a structure comparable to that of a natural language, and that such neural languages are somehow acquired: As the child learns its native language. Finally, the ascription states of languageless creatures is a difficult topic that needs more attention. It is possible that as we learn more about the logic of our ascriptions of propositional content, we will realize that these ascriptions are egocentrically based on a similarity to the language in which we express our beliefs. We might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to a creature who does not speak something a lot like one of our natural languages, or who does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.

The relation between language and thought is philosophies chicken-or-egg problem. Language and thought is evidently importantly related, but how exactly are they related? Does language come first and make thought possible, or is it vice versa? Or are they on a par, each making the other possible.

When the question is stated this generally, however, no unqualified answer is possible. In some respects thought is prior, and in other respects neither is prior. For example, it is arguable that a language is an abstract pairing of expressions and meaning, a function in the set-theoretic sense from expressions onto meaning. This makes sense of the fact that Esperanto is a language no one speaks, and it explains why it is that, while it is a contingent fact that ‘La neige est blanche’ means that snow is white among the French. It is a necessary truth that it means that in French. But if natural languages such as French and English are abstract objects in this sense, then they exist in possible worlds in which there are no thinkers in this respect, then, language as well as such notions as meaning and truth in a language, is prior to thought.

But even if languages are construed as abstract expression-meaning pairings, they are construed that way as abstractions from actual linguistic practice ~ from the use of language in communicative behaviour ~ and there remains a clear sense in which language is dependent on thought. The sequence of inscribes ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome. This is a contingent fact, but dependent on the way we use ‘Naples’. Rome and the other parts of that sentence. Had our linguistic practices been different, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome has something to do with the beliefs and intentions underlying our use of the words and structures that compose the sentence. More generally, it is a platitude that the semantic features that inscribes and sounds have in a population of speakers are, at least, partly determined by the ‘propositional attitudes’ those speakers have in using those inscriptions and sounds or in using the parts and structures that compose them. This is the same platitude, of course, which says that meaning depends at least partly on use: For the use in question is intentional use in communicative behaviour. So, here, is one clear sense in which language is dependent on thought: Thought is required to imbue inscriptions and sounds with the semantic features they have in populations of speakers.

The sense in which language does depend on thought can be wedded to the sense ion which language does not depend on thought in the ways that: We can say that a sequence of ascriptions or sounds (or, whatever) σ means ‘q’ in a language ‘L’, construed as a function from expressions onto meaning, iff L(σ) = q. this notion of meaning-in-a-language, like the notion of a language, is a mere set-theoretic notion that is independent of thought in that it presupposes nothing about the propositional attitudes of language users: σ can mean ‘q’ in ‘L’ even if ‘L’ has never been used? But then we can say that σ also means ‘q’ in a population ‘P’ jus t in case members of ‘P’ use some language in which σ ,means ‘q’: That is, just in case some such language is a language of ‘P’. The question of moment then becomes: What relation must a population ‘P’ bear to a language ‘L’ in order for it to be the case that ‘L’ is a language of ‘P’, a language members of ‘P’ actually speak? Whatever the answer to this question is, this much seems right: In order for a language to be a language of a population of speakers, those speakers in their produce sentences of the language in their communicative behaviour. Since such behaviour is intentional, we know that the notion of a language

‘s being the language of a population of speakers presupposes the notion of thought. And since that notion presupposes the notion of thought, we also know that the same is true of the correct account of the semantic features expressions have in populations of speakers.

This is a pretty thin result, not one likely to be disputed, and the difficult questions remain. We know that there is some relation ‘R’ such that a language ‘L’ is used by a population ‘P’ iff ‘L’ bears ‘R’ to ‘P’. Let us call this relation, whatever it turns out to be, the ‘actual-language reflation’. We know that to explain the actual-language relation is to explain the semantic features expressions have among those who are apt to produce those expressions. And we know that any account of the relation must require language users to have certain propositional attitudes. But how exactly is the actual language relation to be explained in terms of the propositional attitude of language users? And what sort of dependence might those propositional attitudes in turn have those propositional attitudes in turn have on language or on the semantic features that are fixed by the actual-language relation? Let us, least of mention, begin once again, as in the relation of language to thought, before turning to the relation of thought to language.

All must agree that the actual-language relation, and with it the semantic features linguistic items have among speakers, is at least, partly determined by the propositional attitudes of language users. This still leaves plenty of room for philosophers to disagree both about the extent of the determination and the nature of the determining propositional attitude. At one end of the determination spectrum, we have those who hold that the actual-language relation is wholly definable in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. This position in logical space is most famously occupied by the programme, sometimes called ‘intention-based semantics’, of the late Paul Grice and others. The foundational notion in this enterprise is a certain notion of speaker meaning. It is the species of communicative behaviour reported when we say, for example, that in uttering ‘ll pleut’, Pierre meant that it was raining, or that in waving her hand, the Queen meant that you were to leave the room, intentional-based semantics seeks to define this notion of speaker meaning wholly in terms of communicators’ audience-directed intentions and without recourse to any semantic notion. Then it seeks to define the actual-language relation in terms of the now-defined notion of speaker meaning, together with certain ancillary notions such as that of a conventional regularity or practice, themselves defined wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. The definition of the actual-language relation in terms of speaker meaning will require the prior definition in terms of speaker meaning of other agent-semantic notions, such as the notions of speaker reference and notions of illocutionary act, and this, too, is part of the intention-based semantics.

Some philosophers object to the intentional-based semantics because they think it precludes a dependence of thought on the communicative use of language. This is a mistake. Even if the intentional-based semantic definitions are given a strong reductionist reading, as saying that public-language semantic properties (i.e., those semantic properties that supervene on use in communicative behaviour) it might still be that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had mastery of a public-language. However, our generating causal explanatory y generalizations, and subject to no more than the epistemic indeterminacy of other such terms. The causal explanatory approach to reason-giving explanations also requires an account of the intentional content of our psychological states, which makes it possible for such content to be doing such work. By the early 1970's, and many physicalists looked for a way of characterizing the primary and priority of the physical that is free from reductionist implications. As we have in attestation, the key attraction of supervenience to physicalists has been its promise to deliver dependence without reduction. For example, of moral theory has seemed encouraging as Moore and Hare, who made much of the supervenience of the moral on the naturalistic, were at the same time, strong critics of ethical naturalism, the principal reductionist position in ethical theory. And thee has been a broad consensus among ethical theorists that Moore and Hare were right, that the moral, or more broadly the normative, is supervening on the non-moral without being reducible to it. Whether or not this is plausible (that is a separate question), it would be no more logically puzzling than the idea that one could not have any propositional attitudes unless one had one’s with certain sorts of contents. there is no pressing reason to think that the semantic needs to be definable in terms of the psychological. Many intention-based semantic theorists have been motivated by a strong version of ‘physicalism’, which requires the reduction of all intentional properties (i.e., all semantic and propositional-attitude properties) too physical , or at least, topic-neutral or functional properties, for it is plausible that there could be no reduction of the semantic and the psychological to the physical without a prior reduction of the semantic to the psychological. But it is arguable that such a strong version of physicalism is not what is required in order to fit the intentional into the natural order.

So, the most reasonable view about the actual-language relation is that it requires language users to have certain propositional attitudes, but there is no prospect of defining the relation wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. It is further plausible that any account of the actual-language relation must appeal to speech acts such as speaker meaning, where the correct account of these speech acts is irreducibly semantic (they will fail to supervene on the non-semantic propositional altitudes of speakers in the way that intentions fail to supervene on an agent’s beliefs and desires). If this is right, it would still leave a further issue about the ‘definability’ of the actual-language relation, and if so, will any irreducibly semantic notions enter into that definition other than the sorts of speech act notions already alluded to? These questions have not been much discussed in the literature as there is neither an established answer nor competing school of thought. Such that the things in philosophy that can be defined, and that speech act notions are the only irreducibly semantic notions the definition must appeal to.

Our attention is now to consider on or upon the dependence of thought on language, as this the claim that propositional attitudes are relations to linguistic items which obtain at least, partly by virtue of the content those items have among language users. This position does not imply that believers have to be language users, but it does make language an essential ingredient in the concept of belief. However, we might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to who does not speak something. A lot like, does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.

The Scottish philosopher, born in Edinburgh, David Hume (1711-76 ) whose theory of knowledge starts from the distinction between perception and thought. When we see, hear, feel, etc. (In general, perceive) something we are ware of something immediately present to the mind through the senses. But we can also think and believe and reason about things which are not present to our senses at the time, e.g., objects and events in the past, the future or the present beyond our current perceptual experience. Such beliefs make it possible for us too deliberate and so act on the basis of information we have acquired about the world.

For Hume all mental activity involves the presence before the mind o some mental entity. Perception is said to differ for thought only in that the kinds of things that are present to the mind in each case are present to the mind in each case are different. In the case of perception it is an ‘impression’: In the case of thought, although what is thought about is absent, what is present to the mind is an ‘idea’ of whatever is thought about. The only difference between an impression and its corresponding idea is the greater ‘force and liveliness’ with which it ‘strikes upon the mind’.

All the things that we can think or believe or reason about are either ‘relations of ideas’ or ‘matters of fact’. Each of the former (e.g., that three times five equals half of thirty) holds necessarily: Its negation implies a contradiction, such truths are ‘discoverable by the operation of pure thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Hume has no systematic theory of this kind of knowledge: What is or is not included in a given idea, and how we know whether it is, is taken as largely unproblematic. each ‘matter of fact’ is contingent: Its negation is distinctly conceivable and represents a possibility. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible and no more implies a contradiction than the proposition that it will rise. Thought alone is therefore, never sufficient to assure us of the truth of any matter of fact. Sense experience is needed. Only what is directly present to the senses at a given moment is known by perception. A belief in a matter of fact which is not present at the time must therefore be arrived at by a transition of some kind from present impressions to a belief in the matter of fact in question. Hume’s theory of knowledge is primarily an explanation of how that transition is in fact made. It takes the form of an empirical ‘science of human nature’ which is to be based of careful observation of what human beings do and what happens to them.

Its leading into some tangible value, which approves inversely qualifying, in that thoughts have contents carried by mental representations. Now, there are different representations, pictures, maps, models, and words ~ to name only some. Exactly what sort of representation is mental representation? Insofar as our understanding of cognizant connectionism will necessarily have implications for philosophy of mind. Two areas in particular on which it is likely to have impact are the analysis of the mind as a representational system and the analysis of intentional idioms. That is more that imagery has played an enormously important role in philosophy conceptions of the mind. The most popular view of images prior to this century has been what we might call ‘the picture theory’. According to this view, held by such diverse philosophers as Aristotle, Descartes, and Locke, mental images ~ specifically in the way they represent objects in the world,. Despite its widespread acceptance, the picture theory of mental images was left largely unexplained in the traditional philosophical literature. Admittedly, most of those accepted the theory held that mental images copy or resemble what the present, but little more was said. Sensationalism, distinguishes itself as a version of representationalist by positing that mental representations are themselves linguistic expressions within a ‘language of thought’. While some sententialists conjecture that the language of thought is just the thinker’s spoken language internalized. An unarticulated, internal; language in which the computations supposedly definitive of cognition occur. Sententialism is as a natural consequence to take hold a provocative thesis.

Thoughts, in having contents, posses semantic properties, yet, that does not imply that they lack an unspoken, internal, mental language. Sententialism need not insist that the language of thought be any natural spoken language like Chinese or English. Rather it simply proses that psychological states that admit of the sort of semantic properties are likely relations to the sort of structured representations commonly found in, but not isolated to, public languages. This is certainly not to say that all psychological states in all sorts of psychological agents must be relations to mental sentences. Rather the idea is that thinking ~ at least, the kind Peter Abelard (1079-1142) exemplifies ~ involves the processing of internally complex representations. Their semantic properties are sentences to those of their parts much in the manner in which the meanings and truth conditions of complex public sentences are dependent upon the semantic features of their components. Abelard might also exploit various kinds of mental representations and associated processes. A sententialists may allow that in some of his cognitive adventures Abelard rotates mental images or recalcitrates weights on connections among internally undifferentiated networked nodes. Sententialism is simply the thesis that some kinds of cognitive phenomena are best explained by the hypothesis of a mental language. There is, then, no principled reason of non-verbal creatures precludes the language of thought.

It is tempting too sleek over the representational theory by speaking of a language thought, nonetheless, that Fodor argues that representation and the inferential manipulation of representations require a medium of representation, least of mention, in human subjects than in computers. Say, that physically realized thoughts and mental representations are ‘linguistic’, such that of (1) they are composed of parts and are syntactically structured: (2) Their simplest parts refer to or denote things and properties in the world, (3) their meanings as wholes are determined by the semantical properties of their basic parts together with the grammatical rules that have generated their overall syntactic structures, (4) they have truth-conditions, that is, putative states of affairs in the world that would make them true, and accordingly they are true or false depending on the way the world happens actually to be: (5) They bear logical relations of entailment or implication to each other. In this way, they have according to the representational theory: Human beings have systems of physical states that serve as the elements of a lexicon or vocabulary, and human beings (somehow) physically realize rules that combine strings of those elements into configuration having the plexuities of representational contents that common sense associates with the propositional altitudes. And that is why thoughts and beliefs are true or false just as English sentences are, though a ‘language of thought’ may differ sharply in its grammar from any natural language.

Thought and language, in philosophy are evidently importantly related, but how exactly are they related? Does language come first and make thought possible or vice versa? Or are they on a par, each making the other possible?

When the question is stated this generally, has nonetheless no unqualified answer is possible. In some respects language is prior, in other respects thought is prior. For example, it is arguable that a language is an abstract pairing of expressions and meanings, a function, in the set-theoretic sense, from expressions onto meanings. This makes sense of the fact that Esperanto is a language no one speaks, and it explains why it is that, while it is a contingent fact that, ‘snow is white’, it is a necessary truth that it means that snow is white. However, if natural languages such as French and English are abstract objects in this sense, then they exist whether or not anyone speaks them: They even exist in possible worlds in which there are no thinkers. Once, again, language, as well as such notions as meaning and truth in a language, is prior to thought.

Yet, even if languages are construed as abstract expression-meaning pairings, they are construed that way as abstractions from actual linguistic practice ~ from the use of language in communicative behaviour ~ and there remains a clear sense in which language is dependent on thought. The sequence of succession is that, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ mans among us that Naples is south of Rome. This is a contingent fact, dependent on the way we use ‘Naples’, ‘Rome’ and the other parts of that sentence. Had our linguistic practices been different, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ might have meant something entirely different or nothing at all among us. Plainly, the fact that ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome has something to do with the ‘beliefs’ and ‘intentions’ underlying our use of the words and structure that compose the sentence. More generally, it is a platitude that the semantic features that decide on or upon the mark and sounds have in population of speakers ate, at least, partly determined by the propositional altitudes, those speakers have in using those marks and sounds, or in using the parts and structure that compose them. This is the same platitude, of course, which says that meaning depends at least partly on use: For the use in question is intentional use in communicative behaviour. So here is one clear sense in which is required to imbue marks and sounds with the semantic features they have in populations of speakers.

We know that there is some relation R such that a language L is used by a population P iff L bears R to P. This relation, however, of whatever it turns out to be, the actual-language relation is to explain the semantic features expressions, least of mention, have among those who are apt to produce those expressions, and we know that any account of the relation must require language users to have certain propositional attitudes. But how exactly is the actual-language relation to be explained in terms of the propositional attitudes of language users? And what sort of dependence might those propositional attitudes in turn have on language or on the semantic features that are fixed by the actual-language relation?

Some philosophers object to intention-based semantics only because they think it precludes a dependence of thought on the communicative use of language. This is a mistake. Even if intention-based semantic definitions are given a strong reductionist reading, as saying that public-language semantic properties (i.e., those semantic properties that supervene on us in communicative behaviour) just are psychological properties. It might still be that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had mastery of a public language. The idea of supervenience is usually thought to have originated in moral theory, in the works of such philosopher s as G.E. Moore and R.M. Hare, nonetheless, Hare, for example, claimed that ethical predicates are ‘supervenient predicates’ in the same sense that no two things (persons, acts, states of affairs) could be exactly alike in all descriptive or naturalistic respects but unlike in that some ethical predicate (‘good’, right’, etc.) truly applies to one but not to the other. That is, there could be no difference in a moral respect without a difference in some description, or non-moral respect. following Moore and Hare, from whom he avowedly borrowed the idea of supervenience, Davidson went on to assert that supervenience in the sense is consistent with the irreducibility of the supervenient to their ‘subvenient’, or ‘base’, properties. ‘Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition . . . ’.

Thus, three ideas have come to be closely associated with supervenience: (1) ‘Property covariation’ (if two things are indiscernible in base properties, they must be indiscernible in supervenience properties). (2) ‘Dependence’ (supervenient properties are dependent on, or determined by, their subvenient bases, and (3) ‘Non-reducibility’ (property covariation and dependence involved in supervenience can not reducible to their base properties). Whether or not this is plausible (that is, a separate question), it would be no more logically puzzling that the idea that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had ones with certain sorts of content, Tyler Burge’s insight, that the contents of one’s thoughts is partially determined by the meaning of one’s words on one’s linguistic community is perfectly consistent with any intention-based semantics, reduction of the semantic to the psychological. Nevertheless, there is reason to be sceptical of the intention-based semantic programme.

So the most reasonable view about the actual-language relation is that it requires language users to have certain propositional attitudes, but there is no prospect of defining the relation wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. It is further plausible that any account of the actual-language relation ,must appeal to speech acts such as speaker meaning, where the correct account of these speech acts is irreducibly semantic (they will fail to supervene on the non-semantic propositional attitudes of speakers in the way that intentions fail to supervene on an agent’s beliefs and desires). Is it possible to define the actual-language relation, and if so, will any irreducibly semantic notions enter into that definition other than the sorts of speech act notions already alluded to? These questions have not been much discussed in the literature. There are neither an established answer nor competing schools of thought. However, the actual-language relation is one of the few things in philosophy that can be defined, and that speech act notions are the only irreducibly semantic notions the definition must appeal to (Schiffer, 1993).

An substantiated dependence of thought on language seems unobtainably approachable, however, a useful point is an acclaimed dependence that propositional attitudes are relations to linguistic items which obtain, in, at least, in part, by virtue of the content those items have among language users. This position does not imply that believers have to be language users, but it does make language an essential ingredient in the concept of belief. The position is motivated by two considerations: (a) The supposition that believing is a relation to thing believed, which things have truth values and stand in logical relations to one another, and (b) the desire not to take things believed to be propositions ~ abstract, mind and language-independent objects that have essentially the truth conditions they have. As to say that (as well motivated: The relational construal of propositional attitudes is probably the best way to account for the quantification in ‘Harvey believes something irregular about you’. But there are problems with taking linguistic items, than propositions, as the objects of belief. In that, if ‘Harvey believes that irregularities are founded grounds held to abnormality’ is represented along the lines of Harvey, and abnormal associations founded to irregularity, then one could know the truth expressed by the sentence about Harvey without knowing the content of his belief: For one could know that he stands in the belief relation to ‘irregularities are abnormal’ without knowing its content. This is unacceptable, as if Harvey believes that irregularity stems from abnormality, then what he believes ~ the reference of ‘That irregularity is abnormal’ ~ is that irregularities are abnormal. But what is this thing, which irregularities are abnormal? Well, it is abstract, in that it has no spatial locality: It is mind and language independent, in that it exists in possible world in which whose displacement is neither the thinkers nor speakers, and necessarily, it is true iff irregularly is abnormal. In short, it is a proposition ~ an abstract mind and-language thing that has a truth condition and has essentially the truth condition it has.

A more plausible way that thought depends on language is suggested by the topical thesis that we think in a ‘language of thought’. As, perhaps, this is nothing more than the vague idea that the neural states that realize our thoughts ‘have elements and structure in a way that is analogous to the way in which sentences have elements and structure’. But we can get a more literal rendering by relating it to the abstractive conception of language already recommended. On this conception, a language is a function from ‘expressions’ ~ sequence of marks or sounds or neural states or whatever ~ onto meanings, which meanings will include the propositions our propositional-attitude relations relates us to. We could then read the language of thought hypothesis as the claim that having in a certain relation to a language whose expressions are neural states. There would mow be more than one ‘actual-language relation’. One might be called the ’public-language relation’, since it makes a language the instrument of communication of a population of speakers. Another relation might be called the ‘language-of-thought relation’ because standing in the relation to a language makes it one’s ‘Lingus mentis’. Since the abstract notion of a language has been so weakly construed, it is hard to see how the minimal language-of-thought proposal just sketched could fail to be true. At the same time, it has been given no interesting work to do. In trying to give it more interesting work, further dependencies of thought on language might come into play. For example, it has been claimed that the language of thought of a public-language user is the public language she uses: her neural sentences in something like her spoken sentences. For another example, it might be claimed that even if one’s language of thought is distinct from one’s public language, the language-of-thought relation makes presuppositions about the public-language relation in ways that make the content of one’s thoughts dependent on the meaning of one’s words in one’s public-language community.

Tyler Burge has in fact shown that there is as sense in which thought content is dependent on the meaning of words in one’s linguistic community (Burge, 1979). Alfred, for instance, uses ‘arthritis’ under the misconception that arthritis is not confined to the joints, he also applies the word to rheumatoid ailments not in the joints. Noticing an ailment in his thigh that is symptomatically like the disease in his hands and ankles, he says to his doctor, ‘I have arthritis in the thigh’. Here Alfred is expressing his false belief that he has arthritis in the thigh. But now consider a counterfactual situation that differs in just one respect (and whatever it entails): Alfred would be expressing a true belief when he says ‘I have arthritis in the thigh’. Since the proposition he believes is true while the proposition that he has arthritis in the thigh is false, he believe’s some other proposition. This shows that standing in the belief relation to a proposition can be partly determined by the meaning of words in one’s public language. The Burge phenomenon seem real, but it would be nice to have a deep explanation of why thought content should be dependent on language in this way.

Finally, there is the old question of whether, or to what extent, a creature who does not understand a natural language can have thoughts. Now it seems pretty compelling that higher mammals and humans raised without language have their behaviour controlled by mental states that are sufficiently like our beliefs, desires and intentions to share those labels. It also seems easy to imagine non-communicating creatures who have sophisticated mental lives (they build weapons, dams, bridges, have clever hunting devices, etc.) At the same time, ascriptions of particular contents to non-language-using creatures typically seem exercises in loose speaking (does the dog really believe that there is a bone in the yard?), and it is no accident that, as a ,matter of fact, creatures who do not understand a natural language have at best, primitive mental lives. There is no accepted explanation of these facts. It is possible that the primitive mental lives of animals account for their failure to master natural language, but the better explanation may be Chomsky’s, that animals lack a special language faculty unique to our species. As regards the inevitable primitive mental life of an otherwise language, this might simply be due to the ignorance and lack of intellectual stimulation such a person would be doomed to. As such, it might require a neural language with a structure comparable to that of a natural language, and that such neural languages are somewhat acquire, as the child learns its native language. Finally, the ascription of content to the propositional attitudes states of language creatures is a difficult topic that needs more attention. It is possible that we as we learn more about the logic of our ascriptions of propositional content, we will realize that these ascriptions are egocentrically based on a similarity to the language in which we express our beliefs. We might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to a creature who does not speak languages, or who does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thoughts’s dependence on language.

All of this suggests a specific ‘mental organ’, to use Chomsky’s phrase, that has evolved in the human cognitive system specifically in order to make language possible. The specific structure of this organ simultaneously constrains the range of possible human languages and guides the learning of the child’s target language, later ,making rapid on-line language processing possible. The principles represented in this organ constitute the innate linguistic knowledge of the human being. Additional evidence for the early operation of such an innate language acquisition module is derived from the many infant studies that show that infants selectively attend to sound-streams that are prosodically appropriate that have pauses at clausal boundaries, and that contain linguistically permissible phonological sequences.

A particularly strong form of the innateness hypothesis in the psycholinguistic domain is Fodor’s (1975, 1987), ‘Language of Thought’ hypothesis. Fodor argues not only that the language learning and processing faculty is innate, but that the human representational system exploits an innate language of thought which has all of the expressive power of any learnable human language. Hence, he argues, all concepts are in fact innate, in virtue of the representational power of the language of thought. This remarkable doctrine is hence even stronger than classical rationalist doctrine of innate ideas: Whereas, Chomsky echoes Descartes in arguing that the most general concepts required for language learning are innate, while allowing that more specific concepts are acquired, Fodor echoes Plato in arguing that every concept we ever ‘learn’ is in fact innate.

Fodor defends this view by arguing that the process of language learning is a process of hypothesis formation and testing, where among the hypotheses that must be formulated are meaning postulates for each term in the language being acquired. But in order to formulate and test a hypothesis of the form ‘χ’ means ‘y’, where ‘χ’ denotes a term in the target language, prior to the acquisition of that language, the language learner. Fodor argues, must have the resources necessary to express ‘y’. Therefore, there must be, in the language of thought, a predicate available co-extensive with each predicate in any language that a human can learn. Fodor also argues for the language of thought thesis by noting that the language in which the human information cannot be a human spoken language, since that would, contrary to fact, privilege one of the world’s languages as the most easily acquired. Moreover, it cannot be, he argues, that each of us thinks in our own native language since that would (a) predict that we could not think prior to acquiring a language, contrary to the original argument, and (b) would mean that psychology would be radically different for speakers of different languages. Hence, Fodor argues, there must be a non-conventional language of thought, and the facts that the mind is ‘wired’ in mastery of its predicates together with its expressive completeness entail that all concepts are innate.

The dissertating disputation about whether there are innate qualities that infer on or upon the innate values whereby ideas are much older than previously imagined. Plato in the ‘Meno’ (the learning paradox), famously argues that all of our knowledge is innate. Descartes (1596-1650) and Leibniz (1646-1716) defended the view that the mind contains innate ideas: Berkeley (1685-1753), Hume (1711-76) and Locke (1632-1704) attacked it. In fact, as we now conceive the great debate between European Rationalism and British empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the doctrine of innate ideas is a central effectuality of contention: Rationalists typically claim that knowledge is impossible without a significant stock of general innate ‘concepts’ or judgements, empiricists argued that all ideas are acquired from experience. This debate is replayed with more empirical content and with considerably greater conceptual complexities in contemporary cognitive science, most particularly within the domain of psycholinguistic theory and cognitive developmental theory. Although Chomsky is recognized as one of the main forces in the overthrow of behaviourism and in the initiation of the ‘cognitive era’. His relation between psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology has always been an uneasy one. The term ‘psycholinguistics’ is often taken to refer primarily to psychological work on language that is influenced by ideas from linguistic theory. Mainstream cognitive psychologists, for example when they write textbooks, oftentimes prefer the term ‘psychology of language’ the difference is not, however, merely in a name, least be of mention, that both Fodor and Chomsky, who argue that all concepts, or all of linguistic knowledge is innate, lend themselves to this interpretation, against empiricists who argue that there is no innate appeal in explaining the acquisition of language or the facts of cognitive development. But this debate would be a silly and a sterile for obvious reasons, something is innate. Brains are innate, and the structure of the brain must constrain the nature of cognitive and linguistic development to dome degree. Equally obviously, something is learned and is learned as opposed too merely grown as limbs or hair grow. For not all of the world’s citizens end up speaking English, or knowing the Special Theory of Relativity. The interesting questions then all concern exactly what is innate, to what degree it counts as knowledge, and what is learned, and what degree its content and structure are determined by innately specified cognitive structures. And that is plenty to debate about.

Innatist argue that the very presence of linguistic universals argue for the innateness of linguistic knowledge, but more importantly and more compelling that the fact that these universals are, from the standpoint of communicative efficiency, or from the standpoint of any plausible simplicity criterion, adventitious. There are many conceivable grammars, and those determined by universal grammar are not ipso facto the most efficient or the simplest. Nonetheless, all human language satisfy the constraints of universal grammar. Since neither the communicative environment nor the commutative task can explain this phenomenon. It is reasonable to suppose that it is explained by the structure of the mind ~ and, therefore, by fact that the principles of universal grammar lie innate in the mind and constrain the language that a human can acquire.

Linguistic empiricists, answer that there are alternative possible explanations of the existence of such adventitious universal properties of human languages. For one thing, such universals could be explained, Putnam (1975, 1992) argues, by appeal to a common ancestral language, and the inheritance of features of that language by its descendants. Or it might turn out that despite the lack of direct evidence at present the features of universal grammar in fact do serve either the goals of communicative efficacy or simplicity according to a metric of psychological importance. Finally, empiricist point out , he very existence of universal grammar might be a trivial logical artefact (Quine, 1968): for one thing, any finite set of structures will have some feature s in common. Since there are a finite number of languages, it follows trivially that there are features they all share. Moreover, it is argued, many features of universal grammar are interdependent. So in fact the set of functional principles shared by the world’s languages may be rather small. Hence, even if these are innately determined, the amount of innate knowledge thereby required may be quite small as compared with the total corpus of general linguistic knowledge acquired by the first language learner.

These replies are rendered less plausible, innatists argue, when one considers the fact that the errors language learners make in acquiring their first language seem to be driven far more by abstract features of grammar than by any available input data. So, despite receiving correct examples of irregular plurals or past tense forms for verbs, and despite having correctly formed the irregular forms for those words, children will often incorrectly regularize irregular verbs once acquiring mastery of the rule governing regulars in their language. And in general, not only the correct inductions of linguistic rules by young language learners, but more importantly, given the absence of confirmatory data and the presence of refuting data, children’s erroneous inductions are always consistent with universal grammar, often simply representing the incorrect setting of a parameter in the grammar. More generally, innatists argue, that all grammatical rules that have ever been observed satisfy the structure-dependence constraint. That is, many linguists and psycholinguists argue that all known grammatical rules of all the world’s languages, including the fragmentary languages of young children must be stated as rules governing hierarchical sentence structures, and not governing, say, sequence of words. Many of these, such as the constituent-command constraint governing anaphor, are highly abstract indeed, and appear to be respected by even very young children (Solan, 1983 & Crain, 1991). Such constraints may, innatists argue, be necessary conditions of learning natural language I the absence of specific instruction, modelling and correction conditions in which all first language learning acquire their native languages.

An important empiricist answer for these observations derives from recent studies of ‘connectionist’ models of the first language acquisition (Rummelhart & McClelland, 1986, 1987). Connectionist systems, not previously trained to represent any sunset of universal grammar that induce grammar which include a large set of regular forms and a few irregulars also tend to over-regularize, exhibiting the same U-shape learning curve seen in human language acquirers. It is also noteworthy that conceptionist learning systems that induce grammatical systems acquire ‘accidentally’ rules on which they are not explicitly trained, but which are consistent with those upon which they are trained, suggesting that s children acquire position of their grammar, they may accidentally ‘learn’ other consistent rules, which may be correct in other human language, but which then must be ‘unlearned’ in their home language. Yet, such ‘empiricist’ language acquisition systems have yet to demonstrate their ability to induce a sufficiently wide range of the rules hypothesized to be comprised by universal grammar to constitute a definite empirical argument for the possibility of natural language acquisition in the absence of a powerful set of innate constraints.

The poverty of the stimulus argument has been of enormous influence in innateness debates, though its soundness is hotly contested. Chomsky notes that (1) the examples of the target language to which the language learner is exposed are always jointly compatible with an infinite number of alternative grammars, and so vastly undermine the grammar, of the language, and (2) the corpus always contains many examples of ungrammatical sentences, which should in fact, serve as falsifiers of any empirically induced correct grammar of the language, also (3) there is, in general, no explicit reinforcement of correct utterances or correction of incorrect utterances, either by the learner or by those in the immediate training environment. Therefore, he argues, since it is impossible to explain the learning of the correct grammar ~ a task accomplished by all normal children within a very few years ~ on the basis of any available data or known learning algorithms, it must be that the grammar is innately specified, and is merely ‘triggered’ by relevant environmental cues.

Opponents of the linguistic innateness hypothesis, however, point out that the circumstance that Chomsky notes in this argument is hardly specific to language. As well known from arguments due to Hume (1978). Wittgenstein (1953), Goodman (1972) and Kripke (1982), in all cases of empirical abduction, and of training in the use of a word, data under-determine theories. This moral is emphasized by Quine (1954, 1960) as the principle of the undertermination of theory by data. But we, nonetheless, do abduce adequate theories in science, and we do lean the meaning of words. And it would be bizarre to suggest that all correct scientific theories or the facts of lexical semantics are innate.

But, innatists reply, that when the empiricist relies on the underdetermination of theory by data as a counterexample, a significant disanalogousness with language acquisition is ignored: The abduction of scientific theories is a difficult, labourious process, taking a sophisticated theorist a great deal of time and deliberate effort. First language acquisition, by contrast, is accomplished effortlessly and very quickly by a small child. The enormous relative ease with which such a complex and abstractive domain is mastered by such a naïve ‘theorist’ is evidence for the innateness of the knowledge achieved.

Empiricists such as Putnam (1926- ) have rejoined that innateness under-estimate the amount of time that language learning actually takes, focussing only on the number of years from the apparent onset of acquisition to the achievement of relative mastery over the grammar. Instead of noting how short this interval, they argue, one should count the total number of hours spent listening to language and speaking during this time. That number is in fact, quite large, and is comparable to the number of hours of study and practice required in the acquisition of skills that are not argued to derive from innate structures, such as chess playing or musical composition, hence, they argue once the correct temporal parameters are taken into consideration, language learning looks like one more case of human skill acquisition than like a special unfolding of innate knowledge.

Innatists, however, note that while the ease with which most such skills are acquired depends on general intelligence, language, is learned with roughly equal speed, and too roughly the same level of general syntactic mastery regardless of general intelligence. In fact, even significantly retarded individuals, assuming no special language deficit, acquire their native language on a time-scale and to a degree comparable to that of normally intelligent children. The language acquisition faculty hence, appears to allow access to a sophisticated body of knowledge independent of the sophistication of the general knowledge of the language learner. This is, language learning and utilization mechanisms are not outside of language processing. They are informationally encapsulated ~ only linguistic information is relevant to language acquisition and processing. They are mandatory ~ language learning and language processing are automatic. Moreover, language is subserved by specific dedicated neural structures, damage to which predictably and systematically impairs linguistic functioning, and not general cognitive functioning.

Again, the issues at stake in the debate concerning the innateness of such general concepts pertaining to the physical world cannot be s stark a dispute between an innate and one according to which all empirical knowledge is innate. Rather the important ~ and again, always empirical questions concern just what is innate, and just ‘what’ is acquired, and how innate equipment interacts with the world to produce experience. ‘There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience . . . experience it does not follow that all arises out of experience’.

Philosophically, the unconscious mind postulated by psychoanalysis is controversial, since it requires thinking in terms of a partitioned mind and applying a mental vocabulary (intentions, desires, repression) to a part to which we have no conscious access. The problem is whether this merely uses a harmless spatial metaphor of the mind, or whether it involves a philosophical misunderstanding of mental ascription. Other philosophical reservations about psychoanalysis concern the apparently arbitrary and unfalsifiable nature on the interpretative schemes employed. Basically, least of mention, the method of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy for psychological disorders was pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the method relies on or upon an interpretation of what a patient says while ‘freely associating’ or reporting what comes to mind in connection with topics suggested by the analyst. The interpretation proceeds according to the scheme favoured by the analyst, and reveals ideas dominating the unconscious, but previously inadmissible to the conscious mind of the subject. When these are confronted, improvement can be expected. The widespread practice of psychoanalysis is not matched by established data on such rate of improvement.

Nonetheless, the task of analysing psychoanalytic explanation is complicated is initially in several ways. One concerns the relation of theory to practice. There are various perspectives on the relation of psychoanalysis, the therapeutic practice, to the theoretical apparatus built around it, and these lead to different views of psychoanalysis’ claim to cognitive status. The second concerns psychoanalysis’ legitimation. The way that psychoanalytic explanation is understood has immediate implications for one’s view of its truth or acceptability, and this of course a notoriously controversial matter. The third is exegetical. Any philosophical; account of psychoanalysis must of course start with Freud himself, but it will inevitably privilege some strands of his thought at the expense of others, and in so doing favour particular post-Freudian developments over others.

Freud clearly regarded psychoanalysis as engaged principally in the task of explanation, and held fast to his claims for its truth in the course of alterations in his view of the efficacy of psychoanalysis’ advocates have, under pressure, retreated to the view that psychoanalytic theory has merely instrumental value, as facilitating psychoanalytic therapy: But this is not the natural view, which is that explanation is the autonomous goal of psychoanalysis, and that its propositions are truth-evaluable. Accordingly, it seems that preference should be given to whatever reconstruction of psychoanalytic theory does most to advance its claim to truth. Within, of course, exegetical constraints (what a reconstruction offers must be visibly present in Freud’s writings.)

Viewed in these terms, psychoanalytic explanation is an ‘extension’ of ordinary psychology, one that is warranted by demands for explanation generated from within ordinary psychology itself. This has several crucial ramifications. It eliminates, as ill-conceived, the question of psychoanalysis’ scientific status ~ an issue much discussed, as proponents of different philosophies of science have argued for and against psychoanalysis’ agreement with the canons of scientific method, and its degree or lack of correspondence. Demands that psychoanalytic explanation should be demonstrated to receive inductive support, commit itself to testable psychological laws, and contribute effectively to the prediction of action, have then no more pertinence than the same demands pressed on ordinary psychology ~ which is not very great. When the conditions for legitimacy are appropriately scaled down. It is extremely likely that psychoanalysis succeeds in meeting hem: For psychoanalysis does deepen our understanding of psychological laws, improve the predictability of action in principle, and receive inductive support on the special sense which is appropriate to interpretative practices.

Furthermore, to the extent that psychoanalysis may be seen as structured by and serving well-defined needs for explanation, there is proportionately diminished reason for thinking that its legitimation turns on the analysand’s assent to psychoanalytic interpretation, or the transformative power (whatever it may be) of these. Certainly it is true that psychoanalytic explanation has a reflective dimension lacked by explanations in the physical sciences: Psychoanalysis understands its object, the mind, in the very terms that the mind employs in its unconscious workings (such as its belief in its own omnipotence). But this point does not in any way count against the objectivity of psychoanalytic explanation. It does not imply that what it is for a psychoanalytic explanation to be true should be identified, pragmatically, with the fact that an interpretation may, for the analysand who gains self-knowledge, have the function of translating their directed-causes to set about unconscious mentality into a proper conceptual form. Nor does it imply that psychoanalysis’ attribution of unconscious content needs to be understood in anything less than full-bloodedly realistic terms. =truth in psychoanalysis may be taken to consist in correspondence with an independent mental reality, a reality that is both endorsed with ‘subjectivity’ and in many respects puzzling to its owner.

In the twentieth-century, the last major, self-consciously naturalistic school of philosophy was American ‘pragmatism’ as exemplified particularly in the works of John Dewey (1859-1952). The pragmatists replaced traditional metaphysics and epistemology with theories and methods of the sciences, and grounded their view of human life in Darwin’s biology. Following the second world war, pragmatism was eclipsed by logical positivism and what might be called ‘scientific’ positivism, a philosophy of science as the defining characteristic of all scientific statements. Ernst Mach is frequently regarded as the founder of logical positivism, however, in his book The Conservation of Energy, that only the objects of sense experience have any role in science: The task of physics is ‘the discovery of the laws of the connection of sensations (perceptions): And ‘the intuition of space is bound up with the organization of the senses . . . (so that) we are not justified in ascribing spatial properties to things which are not perceived by the senses’. Thus, for Mach, our knowledge of the physical world is derived entirely from sense experience, and the content of science is entirely characterized by the relationships among the data of our experience.

Nevertheless, pragmatism is a going concern in philosophy of science. It is often aligned with he view that scientific theories are not true or false, but are better or worse instruments for prediction and control. For Charles Peirce (1839-1914) identifies truth itself with a kind of instrumentality. A true belief is the very best we could do by way of accounting for the experiences we have, predicting the future course of experience, etc.

Peirce (1834-1914) called the sort of inference which concludes that all A’s are B’s because there are no known instances to the contrary ‘crude induction’. It assumes that future experience will not be ‘utterly at variance’ with past experience. This is, Peirce says, the only kind of induction in which we are able to infer the truth of a universal generalization. Its flaw is that ‘it is liable at any moment to be utterly shattered by a single experience’, which is to say, that warranted belief is possible only at the observational level. Induction tells us what theories are empirically successful, and thereby what explanations are successful. But the success of an explanation cannot, for historical reasons, be taken as an indicator of its truth.

The thesis that the goal of inquiry is permanently settled belief, and the thesis that the scientific attitude is a disinterested desire for truth, are united by Peirce’s definition of ‘true’. He does not think it false to say that truth is correspondence to reality, but shallow ~ a merely nominal definition, giving no insight into the concept. His pragmatic definition identifies the truth with the hypothetical ideal, which would be the final outcome of scientific inquiry were it to continue indefinitely. ‘Truth is that concordance of . . . [a] statement beliefs’: any truth more perfect than this destined conclusion, any reality more absolute than what is thought in it, is a fiction of metaphysics’. These reveal something both of the subtlety and of the potential for tension, without Peirce’s philosophy. His account of reality aims at a delicate compromise between the undesirable extremes of transcendentalism and idealism, his account of truth at a delicate compromise between the twin desiderata of objectivity and (in-principle) accessibility.

The question of what is and what is not philosophy is not a simply a query of classification. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry. A philosophy of a discipline such as history, physics, or law seeks not so much to solve historical, physical, or legal questions, as to study the concepts that structure such thinking,. And to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions. In this sense philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes self-conscious. The borderline between such ‘second-order’ reflection, and, ways of practising the first-order discipline itself, is not always clear: Philosophical problems may be tamed by the advance of a discipline, and the conduct of a discipline may be swayed by philosophical reflection. But the doctrine neglects the fact that self-consciousness and reflection co-exist with activity. At different times there has been more or less optimism about the possibility of a pure or ‘first’ philosophy, taking from the stand-point from which other intellectual practices can be impartially assessed and subjected to logical evaluation and correction, in that he task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and to unmask counterfeits. Although this belief lay behind much ‘positivist’ philosophy of science, few philosophers now subscribe to it. The contemporary spirit of the subject is hostile to any such possibility, and prefers to see philosophical reflection as continuous with the best practising employment of intellectual fields of rationalizations intended reasons for enquiry.

Nonetheless, the last two decades have been an intermittent interval of extraordinary change in psychology. Cognitive psychology, which focuses on higher mental processes like reasoning, decision making, problem solving, language processing and higher-level visual processing, has become a ~ perhaps the ~ dominant paradigm among experimental psychologists, while behaviouristic oriented approaches have gradually fallen into disfavour. Largely as a result of this paradigm shift, the level of interaction between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically.

One of the central goals of the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploited in the sciences. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explications of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial conceptual perspectives proposed in biological function.

Typically, a functional explanation in biology says that an organ ‘χ’ is present in an animal because ‘χ’ has function ‘F’. What does that mean?

Some philosophers maintain that an activity of an organ counts as a function only if the ancestors of the organ’s owner were naturally selected partly because they had similar organs that performed the same activity. Thus, the historical-causal property, having conferred a selective advantage, is not just evidence that ‘F’ is a function, it is constitutive of F’s being purposively functional.

If this reductive analysis is right, a functional explanation turns out to be sketchy causal explanation of the origin of ‘χ’. It makes the explanation scientifically respectable. The ‘because’ indicates a weak relation of partial causal contribution.

However, this construal is not satisfying intuitively. To say that ‘χ’ is present because it has a function is normally taken to mean, roughly, that ‘χ’ is present it is supposed to do something useful. Yet, this normal interpretation immediately makes the explanation scientifically problematic, because the claim that ‘χ’ is supposed to do something useful appears to be normative and non-objective.

The philosophy of physics is another area in which studies of this sort have been actively pursued. In undertaking this work, philosophers need not and do not assume that there is anything wrong with the science they are studying. Their goal is simply to provide accounts of the theories, concepts and explanatorial strategies that scientists are using ~ accounts that are more explicit, systematic and philosophically sophisticated than the often rather rough-and-ready accounts offered by the scientists themselves.

This account of intentionality is characteristic to perception and action, so that the paradigms that are usually founded of belief or sometimes beliefs and desires are key to understanding intentionality whose representation in a special sense of that word that we can explain intentional states in general, as having both a propositional content and a psychological mode, and the psychological mode which determines the direction with which the intentional state represents its conditions of satisfaction. These considerations are characteristic of all those intentional states with propositional content which do not have a mind-to-world or world-to-mind direction: All of these contain beliefs and desires, and the component beliefs and desires do have an initial direction of fit.

Once, again, of intentionality that the paradigm cases discussed are usually beliefs or sometimes beliefs and desires. However, the biologically most basic forms of intentionality are in perception and intentional action. These also have certain formal features which are not common to beliefs and desires. Consider a case of perception. Suppose I see my hand in front of my face. What are the conditions of satisfaction? First, the perceptual experience of the hand in front of my face has as its condition of satisfaction that there is a hand in front of my face. Thus far the condition of satisfaction is the same as the belief that there is a hand in front of my face. Bu t with perceptual experience there is this difference: In order that the intentional content be satisfied, the fact that there is a hand in front of my face must cause the very experience whose intentional content is that there is a hand in front of my face. This has the consequence that perception has a special kind of condition of satisfaction that we might describe as ‘causally self-referential’. The full conditions of satisfaction of the perceptual experience are, first, that there be a hand in front of my face, and second, that there is a hand in front of my face caused the very experience of whose conditions of satisfaction it forms a part. We can represent this in our canonical form as:

Visual experience (that there is a hand in front of my face

` and the fact that there is a hand in front of my face is causing

this very experience.)

Furthermore, visual experience have a kind o conscious immediacy not characteristic of beliefs and desires. A person can literally be said to have beliefs and desires while sound asleep. But one can only have visual experiences of a non-pathological kind when one is fully awake and conscious because the visual experience are them forms of consciousness.

Event memory is a kind of halfway house between the perceptual experience and the belief. Memory, like perceptual experience Has the causally self-referential feature. Unless the memory is caused by the event, of which it is the memory. It is not a case of satisfied memory, but unlike the visual experience, it need not be conscious. One can be said to remember something while sound asleep. Beliefs, memory and perception all have the mind-to-world direction and memory and perception have the world-to-mind direction of causation.

Increasingly, proponents of the intentional theory of perception argue that perceptual experience is to be differentiated from belief not only in terms of attitude, but also in terms of the kind of content the experience is an attitude toward ascribing contents to be in a certain set-class of content-involving states is for attributes of these states to make the subject as rationally intelligible as possibility, in the circumstances. In one form or another, this idea is found in the writings of Davidson (1917-2003), who introduced the position known as ‘anomalous monism’ in the philosophy of mind, instigating a vigorous debate over the relation between mental and physical descriptions of persons, and the possibility of genuine explanation of events in terms of psychological properties. Although Davidson is a defender of the doctrine of the ‘indeterminacy of radical translation and the ‘indisputability of references, his approach has seemed too many to offer some hope of identifying meaning as a respectable notion, even within a broadly ‘extentionalized’ approach to language. Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a ‘conceptual scheme’, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is anything to translate.

Intentional action has interesting symmetries and asymmetries to perception. Like perceptual experiences, the experiential component of intentional action is causally self-referential. If, for example, I am now walking to my car, then the condition of walking to my car, then experience is that satisfaction of the present experience is that there be certain bodily movements, and that this very experience of acting cause those bodily movements. What is more, like perceptual experience, the experience of acting is typically a conscious mental event. However, unlike the perception memory, the direction of the experience of acting is world-to-mind. My intention will only be fully carried out if the world changes so as to match the content of the intention (hence world-to-mind direction (hence world-to-mind proves directional) and the intention will only be fully satisfied if the intention itself causes the rest of the condition of satisfaction, hence, mind-to-world direction of causation.

Increasingly, proponents of the intentional theory of perception argue that perceptual representational experience is to be differentiated from belief not only in terms of attitude, but, in terms of the kind of content that experience is an attitude toward a better understanding a person’s reasons for the array of emotions and sensations to which he ids subject: What he remembers and what he forges, and how he reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which take into consideration, a fundamental role in individuating content. This, however, cannot be understood purely in terms relational to minimal rationality. A perception of the world as being a certain way is not, and could not be, under a subject’s rational control. Though it is true and rational that perceptions give reasons for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reasons ~ observational beliefs about the environment ~ have contents which can only be elucidated by referring back to perceptual representations belonging of experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states differ from those beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning that they provide reasons for judging or doing: For frequently, these latter judgements and actions can be individuated without reference back to the states that provide reasons for them.

We are acutely aware of the effects of our own memory, its successes and its failures, so that we have the impression that we know something about how it functionally operates. But, with memory, as with most mental functions, what we are aware of is the outcome of its operation and not the operation itself. To our introspections, the essence of memory is language based and intentional. When we appear as a witness in court then the truth, as we are seen to report it is what we say about what we intentionally retrieve. This is, however, a very restricted view o memory albeit, with a distinguished history. William James (1842-1910), an American psychologist and philosopher, whose own emotional needs gave him an abiding interest in problems of religion, freedom, and ethics: The popularity of these themes and his lucid and accessible style made James the most influential American philosopher of the beginning of the 20th century. Nonetheless, James said, that ‘Memory proper is the knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped from consciousness, or rather it is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it before’.

One clue to the underlying structure of our memory system might be its evolutionary history. We have no reason to suppose that a special memory system evolved recently or to consider linguistic aspects of memory and intentional recall as primary. Instead, we might assume that such features are later additions to a much more primitive filing system. From this perspective one would view memory as having the primary function of enabling us (the organism as a whole, that is, not the conscious self) to interpret the perceptual world and helping us to organize our responses to changes that place in the world.

Considerations or other aspects in the content of memory are those with which contain the capacity to remember: to (1) recall past experiences, and (2) retain knowledge that was acquired in the past. It would be a mistake to omit (1), for not any instance of remembering something is an instance of retaining knowledge. Suppose that as a young child you saw the Sky Dome in Toronto, but you did not know at the time which building it was. Later you learn what the Sky Dome is, and you remember having seen it when you were a child. This is an example of obtaining knowledge of a past fact ~ by recalling a past experience, but not an example of retaining knowledge because at the time you were seeing it you did not know you were since you did not know what the Sky Dome was or represented. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to omit (2), for not any instance of remembering something is an instance of recalling the past, let alone a past experience. For example, by remembering my telephone number, I retain knowledge of a past fact, and by remembering the date of the next elections, of a future fact.

According to Aristotle (De Memoria), memory cannot exist without imagery: We remember past experiences by recalling images that represent therm. This theory ~ the representative theory of memory ~ was also held by David Hume and Bertrand Russell (1921). It is subject to three objections, the first of which was recognized by Aristotle himself. That if what I remember is an image present to me now, how can it be that what I remember belongs to the past, how can it be that it is an image now present to my mind? According to the second objection, we cannot tell the difference between images that represent actual memories and those that are mere figments of the imagination. Hume suggested two criteria to distinguish between these two kinds of images, vivacity and orderliness, and Russell a third, an accompanying feeling of familiarity. Critics of the representative theory would argue that these criteria are not good enough that they do not allow us to distinguish reliably between true memories and mere imagination. This objection is not decisive, as it only calls for a refinement of the proposed criteria. Nevertheless, the representative theory succumbs to the third objection, which is fatal: Remembering something does not require an image. In remembering their dates of birth, or telephone numbers, people do not, at least not normally, have an image of anything. In developing an account of memory, we must, therefore, proceed without making images an essential ingredient. One way of accomplishing this is to take the thing that is remembered to be a proposition, the content of which may be about the past, present, or future. Doing so would provide us with an answer to the problem pointed out by Aristotle. If the position we remember is a truth about the past, then we remember the past by virtue of having a cognation of something present ~ the proposition that is remembered.

What, then, are the necessary and sufficient conditions of remembering a proposition, of remembering that ‘p’? To begin with, believing that ‘p’ is not a necessary condition, for at a given moment ‘t’, I, may not be aware of the fact that I still remember that ‘p’ and thus, do not believe that ‘p’ at ‘t’. It is possible that I remember that ‘p’ but, perhaps because I gullibly trust another person’s judgement, unreasonably disbelieve that ‘p’. It will, however, be helpful to focus on the narrower question: Under which conditions is S’s belief that ‘p’ an instance of remembering that ‘p’? It is such an instance only if ‘S’ either (1) previously came to know that ‘p’, or (2) had an experience that put ‘S’ in a position subsequently to come to know that ‘p’. Call this the ‘original input condition’. Suppose, having learned in the past that 12 x 12 = 144 but subsequently having forgotten it. I now come to know again that 12 x 12 = 144 by using a pocket t calculator. Here the original input condition is fulfilled, but obviously this is not an example of remembering that 12 x 12 = 144. Thus, a further condition is necessary: For S’s belief that ‘p’ to be a case of remembering that ‘p’, the belief must be connected in the right way with the original input. Call this the ‘connection condition’. According to Carl Ginet (1988), the connection must be ‘epistemic’, at any time since the original input at which S acquires evidence sufficient for knowing that ‘p’, ‘S’ already knew that ‘p’. Critics would dispute that a purely epistemic account of the connection condition will suffice. They would insist that the connection be causal: For ‘S’ to remember that ‘p’, there must be an uninterrupted causal chain connecting the original input with the present belief.

Not every case of remembering that ‘p’ is one of knowing that ‘p’, although I remember that ‘p’ I might not believe that ‘p’, and I might not be justified in believing that ‘p’, for I might have information that undermines or casts doubt on ‘p’. When, however, do we know something by remembering it? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowing that ‘p’ on the basis of memory? Applying the traditional conception of knowledge, we may say that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ on the basis of memory just in case (1) ‘S’ clearly and distinctly remembers that ‘p’: (2) ‘S’ believes that ‘p’ and (3) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’. (Since (1) entail ss that ‘p’ is true, adding a condition requiring p’s truth is not necessary.) Whether this account of memory knowledge is correct, and how it is to be fleshed out in detail, are questions which concern the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification in general, and thus, will give rise too much controversy.

Memory knowledge is possible only if memory is a source of justification. Common=sense assumes it is. We naturally believe that, unless there are specific reasons for doubt, we believe that we do remember that we seem to remember, unless it is undermined or even contradicted by our background beliefs. Thus, we trust that we have knowledge of the past, however, would argue that this trust is ill-founded. According to a famous argument by Bertrand Russell (1927), it is logically possible that the world sprang into existence five minutes ago, complete with our memories and evidence, since as fossils and petrified trees, suggesting a past of millions of years. If it is, then, there is no logical guarantee that we actually do remember what we seem to remember. Consequently, so the sceptics would argue, there is no reason to trust memory. Some philosophers have replied to this line of reasoning by trying to establish that memory is necessarily reliable that it is logically impossible for the majority of our memory beliefs to be false. Alternatively, our commonsense view may be defended by pointing out that the unreasonable to trust memory ~ does not follow from its premise, memory fails to provide us with a guarantee that we seem to remember is true. For the argument to be valid, it would have to be supplemented with a further premise: For a belief to be justified, its justifying reason must guarantee its truth. Many contemporary epistemologists would dismiss this premise as unreasonably strict. One of the chief reasons for resisting it is that accepting it is harder more reasonable than our trust in particular, clear and vivid deliverance of memory. To the contrary, accepting these as true would actually appear less error prone than accepting an abstract philosophical principle which implies that our acceptance of such deliverance is justified.

These altering distinctions of forms of memory is a crude one, and seems uncategorized by the varying degrees of enabling such terms as ‘conscious’ and ‘explicit’ are so cloud-covered. Their shadowy implication, is well known, according to Schacter, McAndrews and Moscovitch, 1988, have in accordance with, the memory loss or amnesia is an inability to remember recent experiences (even from the very recent past) and to learn various but limited resultants amounts in types of information, and dilate upon features from selective brain damage that leaves perceptual, linguistic, and intellectual skills abounding with the overflowing emptiness of being and nothingness. Memory deficit misfunction have traditionally been studied using techniques designed to elicit explicit memories. So, for example, memory-loose persons in that these amnesic people, might be instructed or otherwise asked to think back to a learning episode and either recall information from that intermittent interval of their lives, or say whether a presented item had previously been encountered in the episodic period of learning. That being said, is that the very same persons who performed uncollectible afflicted in the loose of decayed or deadened or lifeless memory cells. The acquisition of skills is a case in point, and there is considerable experimental evidence showing the consensus of particular amnesic implications over a series of learning episodes. Although, a striking example is the densely amnesic unfortunates who learned how to use a personal computer over numerous sessions, despite declaring at the beginning of each session that he had never used a computer before. In addition to this sort of capacity to learn over a succession of episodes, amnesics have performed well on single-short-lived episodes (such as completing previously shown words given to phraselogic 3-letter cues). So just as these amnesic people clearly reveal the difference between conscious and nonconscious memory, but similar dissociations can be observed in normal subjects, as when performances on indirect tasks reveal the effects of prior events that are not remembered.

Basely, the memory, as that of enabling us to interpret the perceptual world and helping us to organize our responses to the challenges of change, that take place in the world. For both functions we have to accumulate experiences in a memory system in such a way as to enable the productive access of that experience at the appropriate times. The memory, then, can be seen as the repository of experience. Of course, beyond a certain age, we are able to use our memories in different ways, both to store information and to retrieve it. Language is vital in this respect and it might be argued that much of the socialization and the whole of schooling are devoted to just such an extension of an evolutionary (relatively) straightforward system. It will follow that most of the operation of our memory system is preconscious. That is to say, consciousness only has access to the product of the memory processes and not to the processes themselves. The aspects of memory that we are conscious of can be seen as the final state in a complex and hidden set-class of operations.

How should we think about the structure of memory? The dominant metaphor is that of association. Words, ideas, and, emotions are seen as being linked together in an endless, shapeless, and formless entanglement. That is, the way our memory can appear to us if we attempt to reflect on it directly. However, it would be a mistake to dwell too much on the problems of consciousness and imagine that theory represent the inner sanctions of structure. For a cognitive psychologist interested in natural memory phenomena there were a number of reasons for bing deeply dissatisfied with theories based on associative set-classes with which are entangling nets. One ubiquitous class of memory failure seemed particularly troublesome. This is the experience of being able to recall a great deal of what we know able an individual other than their name. One such referent classification would entail, that ‘I know the face, but I just can’t place the name’, if someone else produced name we, may have, perhaps, been able to retrieve the rest of the information needed.

How might various theories of memory account for this phenomenon? First we can take an associative network approach, and the idealized associative network, concepts, such as the concept of a person, are represented as nodes, with associated nodes being connected through links. Generally speaking, the links define the nature of the relationship between nodes, e.g., the subject-predicate distinction. Suppose that the name of the person we are trying to recall is Bill Smith. We would have a Bill Smith node (or a node corresponding to Bill Smith) with all the available information concerning Bill Smith being linked to form some kind of propositional Smith’s name. Now, failure to retrieve Bill Smith’s name, while at the same time Bill Smith, would have to due to an inability to traverse the links to the Bill Smith node. However, this seems contradictory ~ content addressability. That is to say, given that any one constituent of a propositional representation can be accessed, the propositional node, and consequently all the other nodes link to it, should also be accessible. Thus, if we are able to recall where Bill Smith lives, where he works, whom he is married to, then, we should, in principle, be able to access the node representing his name. To account for the inability to do so, some sort of temporality ‘blocking’ of content addressability would seem to be needed. Alternatively, directionality of links would hae to be specified, though this would have to be done on a morally justified basis.

Next, we are to consider schema approaches. In that, schema models stipulate that there are abstract representations, i.e., schemata, in which all invariant information concerning any particular thing are represented. So that we would have a person schema for Bill Smith that would contain all the invariant information about him. This would include his name, personality traits, attitudes, where he lived, whether he had a family, etc. It is not clear how one would deal with our example, least of mention, since some one’s name is the quintessentially invariant property, then, given that it is known. It would have to be represented in the schema or out-line for that person. And, from our example, we knew that other invariant information, as well as variant, non-schematic information, e.g., the last talk he had given, were available for recall. This must be taken as evidence that the schema for Bill Smith was accessed. Why, then, were we unable to recall one particular piece of information that would have to be represented in the schema we clearly had access to? We would have to assume that within the person-schema or out-line for Bill Smith are sub-schema, one of which contained Bill Smith’s name, another containing the name of his wife, and so forth. We would further have to assume that access to the sub-schemata was independent and that, at the time in question, the one containing information about Bill Smith’s name was temporarily inaccessible. Unfortunately the concept of temporary inaccessibility is without precedent in schema theory and does not seem to be independently motivated.

Nonetheless, there are two other set-classes of memory problem that do not fit comfortably into the conventional frameworks. One is that of not being able to recall an event in spite of most detailed cues. This is commonly found when one partner is attempting to remind the other of a shared experience. Finally, we all have to experience of a memory being triggered spontaneously by something that was just an irrelevant part of the background for an event. Common triggers of such experiences are specific locales in town or country, scents and certain pieces of music.

What we learn from these kinds of events are that we need a model with which readily allows of their containing properties:

(1) Not all knowledge is directly retrievable;

(2) The central parts of an episode do not

necessarily cue recall of that episode;

(3) Peripheral cues, which are non-essential parts

of the contexts, can cue recall.

In response to these requirements, the frameworks of reference within which the model is couched is that of information processing. In trying to solve the problem, we first supposed, that memory consists of discrete units, or ‘records’, each containing information relevant to an ‘event’, an event being, for example, a person or a personal experience. Information contained in a record could take any number of forms, with no restrictions being placed on the way information is presented, on the amount being represented or on the number of records that could contain the same nominal information. Attached to each of these records would be some kind of access key. The function of this access key, is singular: It enables the retrieval of the record and nothing more. Only when the particular access key is used can the record, and the information contained therein, be retrieved. As with the record we felt that any type of information could be contained in the access key. However, two features would distinguish it from the record. First, the contents of the access key would be in a different form to that of the record, e.g., represented in a phonological or other central code. Second, the contents of the access key would not be retrievable.

The nature of the match required between the ‘description’ and a ‘head recording’ will be a function of the type of information in the description. If the task is to find the definition of a word or information on a named individual then a precise match may be required at least for the verbal part of the description. We assume that the ‘head recordings’ are searched in parallel. On many occasions there will be more than one head recording that matches the description. However, we require that only one record be retrieved at a time. What is more, evidence in support of this assumption is summarized in Morton, Hammersley and Bekerian (1985). The data indicate that the more recent of two possibilities, in that records are retrieved. We conclude first that once a match is made the search process terminates and secondly, that the matching process is biassed in favour of the more recent of headings. There is, of course, no guarantee that the retrieved records will contain the information that is sought. The records my be incomplete or wrong. However, in such cases, or in the case that no record had been retrieved, there are two options: Either the search is continued or it is abandoned. If the search is to be continued then a new description will have to be formed, since searching again with the same description would result in the same outcome as before. Thus, there has to be a list of criteria upon which a new description can be based.

Retrieval depends on or upon a match between the description and the heading record. The relationship between the given cue and the description is open. It is clear that there needs to be a process of description formation which will pick out the most likely descriptors from the given cue. Clearly, for the search process to be rational the set of descriptors and the set-class of head recordings should overlap. The only reasonable state of affairs would be that the creation of head recordings and the creation of descriptions is the responsibility of the same mechanism.

There are various ways of classifying mental activities and states. One useful distinction is that between the propositional attitudes and everything else. A propositional attitude in one whose description takes a sentence as complement of the verb. Belief is a propositional attitude: One believes (truly or falsely as the case may be), that there are cookies in the jar. That there are cookies in the jar is the proposition expressed by the sentence following the verb. Knowing, judging, inferring, concluding and doubts are also propositional attitudes: One knows, judges, infers, concludes, or doubts that a certain proposition (the one expressed by the sentential complement) is true.

Though the propositions are not always explicit, hope, fear, expectation. Intention, and a great many others terms are also (usually) taken to describe propositional attitudes, one hopes that (is afraid that, etc.) there are cookies in the jar. Wanting a cookie is, or can be construed as, a propositional attitude: Wanting that one has (or eat or whatever) a cookie, intending to eat a cookie is intending that one will eat a cookie.

Propositional attitudes involve the possession and use of concepts and are, in this sense, representational. One must have some knowledge or understanding of what χ’s are in order to think, believe or hope that something is ‘χ’. In order to want a cookie, intend to eat one must, in some way, know or understand what a cookie is. One must have this concept. There is a sense in which one can want to eat a cookie without knowing what a cookie is ~ if, for example, one mistakenly thinks there are muffins in the jar and, as a result wants to eat what is in the jar (= cookies). But this sense is hardly relevant, for in this sense one can want to eat the cookies in the jar without wanting to eat any cookies. For this reason(and this sense) the propositional attitudes are cognitive: They require or presuppose a level of understanding and knowledge, this kind of understanding and knowledge required to possess the concepts involved in occupying the propositional state.

Thought there is sometimes disagreement about their proper analysis, non-propositional mental states, yet do not, at least on the surface, take propositions as their object. Being in pain, being thirsty, smelling the flowers and feeling sad are introspectively prominent mental states that do not, like the propositional attitudes, require the application or use of concepts. One doesn’t have to understand what pain or thirst is to experience pain or thirst. Assuming that pain and thirst are conscious phenomena, one must, of course, be conscious or aware of the pain or thirst to experience them, but awareness of must be carefully distinguished from awareness that. One can be aware of ‘χ’, ~ thirst or a toothache ~ without being aware that, that, e.g., thirst or a toothache, is that like beliefs that and knowledge that, are a propositional attitude, awareness of is not.

As the examples, pain, thirst, tickles, itches, hungers are meant to suggest, the non-propositional states have a felt or experienced [‘phenomenal’] quality to them that is absent in the case of the propositional attitudes. Aside from who it is we believe to be playing the tuba, believing that John is playing the tuba is much the same as believing that Joan is playing the tuba. These are different propositional states, different beliefs, yet, they are distinguished entirely in terms of their propositional content ~ in terms of what they are beliefs about. Contrast this with the difference between hearing John play the tuba and seeing him play the tuba. Hearing John play the tuba and seeing John play the tubas differ, not just (as do beliefs) in what they are of or about (for these experiences are, in fact, of the same thing: John playing the tuba), but in their qualitative character, the one involves a visual, the other an auditory, experience. The difference between seeing John play the tuba and hearing John play the tuba, is then, a sensory not a cognitive deviation.

Some mental states are a combination of sensory and cognitive elements, e.g., as fears and terror, sadness and anger, feeling joy and depression, are ordinarily thought of in this way sensations are: Not in terms of what propositions (if any) they represent, but (like visual and auditory experience) in their intrinsic character, as they are felt to the someone experiencing them. But when we describe a person for being afraid that, sad that, upset that (as opposed too merely thinking or knowing that) so-and-so happened, we typically mean to be describing the kind of sensory (feeling or emotional) quality accompanying the cognitive state. Being afraid that the dog is going to bite me is both to think (that he might bite me) ~ a cognitive state ~ and feel fear or apprehension (sensory) at the prospect.

The perceptual verbs exhibit this kind of mixture, this duality between the sensory and the cognitive. Verbs like ‘to hear’, ‘to say’, and ‘to feel’ is [often] used to describe propositional (cognitive) states, but they describe these states in terms of the way (sensory) one comes to be in them. Seeing that there are two cookies left by seeing. Feeling that there are two cookies left is coming to know this in a different way, by having tactile experiences (sensations).

On this model of the sensory-cognitive distinction (at least it is realized in perceptual phenomena). Sensations are a pre-conceptual, a pre-cognitive, vehicle of sensory information. The terms ‘sensation’ and ‘sense-data’ (or simply ‘experience’) were (and, in some circles, still are) used to describe this early phase of perceptual processing. It is currently more fashionable to speak of this sensory component in perception as the percept, the sensory information store, is generally the same: An acknowledgement of a stage in perceptual processing in which the incoming information is embodied in ‘raw’ sensory (pre-categorical, pre-recognitional) forms. This early phase of the process is comparatively modular ~ relatively immune to, and insulated from, cognitive influence. The emergence of a propositional [cognitive] states ~ seeing that an object is red ~ depends, then, on the earlier occurrence of a conscious, but nonetheless, non-propositional condition, seeing (under the right condition, of course) the red object. The sensory phase of this process constitutes the delivery of information (about the red object) in a particular form (visual): Cognitive mechanisms are then responsible for extracting and using this information ~ for generating the belief (knowledge) that the object is red. (The belief of blindness suggests that this information can be delivered, perhaps in degraded form, at a non-conscious level.)

To speak of sensations of red objects, tubas and so forth, is to say that these sensations carry information about an object’s colour, its shape, orientation, and position and (in the case of audition) information about acoustic qualities such as pitch, timbre, volume. It is not to say that the sensations share the properties of the objects they are sensations of or that they have the properties they carry information about. Auditory sensations are not loud and visual sensations are not coloured. Sensations are bearers of nonconceptualized information, and the bearer of the information that something is red need not itself be red. It need not even be the sort of thing that could be red: It might be a certain pattern of neuronal events in the brain. Nonetheless, the sensation, though not itself red, will (being the normal bearer of the information) typically produce in the subject who undergoes the experience a belief, or tendency to believe, that something red is being experienced. Hence the existence of hallucinations.

Just as there are theories of the mind that would deny the existence of any state of mind whose essence was purely qualitative (i.e., did not consists of the state’s extrinsic, causal, properties) there are theories of perception and knowledge ~ cognitive theories ~ that denies a sensory component to ordinary sense perception. The sensor y dimension (the look, feel, smell, taste of things) is (if it is not altogether denied) identified with some cognitive condition (knowledge or belief) of the experienced. All seeing (not to mention hearing, smelling and feeling) becomes a form of believing or knowing. As a result, organisms that cannot know cannot have experiences. Often, to avoid these striking counterintuitive results, implicit or otherwise unobtrusive (and, typically, undetectable) forms of believing or, knowing.

Aside, though, from introspective evidence (closing and opening one’s eyes, if it changes beliefs at all, doesn’t just change beliefs, it eliminates and restores a distinctive kind of conscionable experience), there is a variety of empirical evidence for the existence of a stage in perceptual processing that is conscious without being cognitive (in any recognizable sense). For example, experiments with brief visual displays reveal that when subjects are exposed for very brief (50 msec.) Intervals to information-rich stimuli, there is persistence (at the conscious level) of what is called an image or visual icon that embodies more information about the stimulus than the subject can cognitively process or report on. Subjects cab exploit the information in this persisting icon by reporting on any part of the absent array of numbers (the y can, for instance, reports of the top three numbers, the middle three or the bottom three). They cannot, however, identify all nine numbers. The y report seeing all nine, and the y can identify any one of the nine, but they cannot identify all nine. Knowledge and brief, recognition and identification ~ these cognitive states, though present for any two or three numbers in the array, are absent for all nine numbers in the array. Yet, the image carries information about all nine numbers (how else accounts for subjects’ ability to identify any number in the absent array?) Obviously, then, information is there, in the experience itself, whether or not it is, or even can be. As psychologists conclude, there is a limit on the information processing capacities of the latter (cognitive) mechanisms that are not shared by the sensory stages themselves.

Perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses. This includes most of what we know. Some would say it includes everything we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm, ring. In each case we come to know something ~ that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up ~ that the light has turned green ~ by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe in coming to know a fact ~ that the melon is overripe ~ by one’s sense of touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.

Seeing a rotten kumquat is not at all like the experience of smelling, tasting or feeling a rotten kumquat. Yet all these experiences can result in the same knowledge ~ Knowledge that the kumquat is rotten. Although the experiences are much different, they must, if they are to yield knowledge, embody information about the kumquat: The information that it is rotten. Seeing that the fruit is rotten differs from smelling that it is rotten, not in what is known, but how it is known. In each case, the information has the same source ~ the rotten kumquat -, but it is, so top speak, delivered via different channels and coded and re-coded in different experiential neuronal excitations as stimulated sense attractions.

It is important to avoid confusing perceptual knowledge of facts, e.g., that the kumquat is rotten, with the perception of objects, e.g., rotten kumquats. It is one thing to see (taste, smell, feel) a rotten kumquat, and quite another to know (by seeing or tasting) that it is a rotten kumquat. Some people, after all, don not know what kumquats look like. They see a kumquat but do not realize (do mot see that) it is a kumquat. Again, some people do not know what a kumquat smell like. They smell a rotten kumquat and ~ thinking, perhaps, that this is a way this strange fruit is supposed to smell ~ does not realize from the smell, i.e., do not smell that it is a rotted kumquat. In such cases people see and smell rotten kumquats ~ and in this sense perceive rotten kumquat ~ and never know that they are kumquats ~ let alone rotten kumquats. They cannot, not at least by seeing and smelling, and not until they have learned something about (rotten) kumquats. Since the topic as such is incorporated in the perceptual knowledge ~ knowing, by sensory means, that something if ‘F’ -, we will be primary concerned with the question of what more, beyond the perception of F’s, is needed to see that (and thereby know that) they are ‘F’. The question is, however, not how we see kumquats (for even the ignorant can do this) but, how we know (if, that in itself, that we do) that, that is what we see.

Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this is that it is meant that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fat, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, or see, by her expression that is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of obtainable knowledge is particularly prevalent in the case of vision but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we can, for example, hear (by the bells) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get away. When we obtain knowledge in this way. It is clear that unless one sees ~ hence, comes to know. Something about the gauge (that it reads ‘empty’), the newspaper (which is says) and the person’s expression, one would not see (hence, know) what one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot ~ not at least in this way ~ hear that one’s visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, b’s being ‘G’, obtains. When this occurs, the knowledge (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) is derived, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.

Though perceptual knowledge about objects is often, in this way, dependent on knowledge of fats about different objects, the derived knowledge is sometimes about the same object. That is, we see that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing, not that some other object is ‘G’, but that ‘a’ itself is ‘G’. We see, by her expression, that she is nervous. She tells that the fabric is silk (not polyester) by the characteristic ‘greasy’ feel of the fabric itself (not, as I do, by what is printed on the label). We tell whether it is an oak tree, a Porsche, a geranium, an igneous rock or a misprint by its shape, colour, texture, size, behaviour and distinctive markings. Perceptual knowledge of this sort is also deprived ~ derived from the more basic facts (about ‘a’) we use to make the identification. In this case the perceptual knowledge is still indirect because, although the same object is involved, the facts we come to know about it are different from the facts that enable us to know it.

Derived knowledge is sometimes described as inferential, but this is misleading, at the conscious level there is no passage of the mind from premise to conclusion, no reasoning, no problem-solving. The observer, the one who sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ (or ‘a’ itself) is ‘G’, need not be (and typically is not) aware of any process of inference, any passage of the mind from one belief to another. The resulting knowledge, though logically derivative, is psychologically immediate. I could see that she was getting angry: so, I moved my hand. I did not, ~ at least not at any conscious level ~ infers (from her expression and behaviour) that she was getting angry. I could (or, so it seemed to me) see that she was getting angry. It is this psychological immediacy that makes indirect perceptual knowledge a species of perceptual knowledge.

The psychological immediacy that characterises so much of our perceptual knowledge ~ even (sometimes) the most indirect and derived forms of it ~ does not mean that learning is not required to know in this way. One is not born with (may, in fact, never develop) the ability to recognize daffodils, muskrats and angry companions. It is only after a long experience that one is able visually to identify such things. Beginners may do something corresponding to inference: They recognize relevant features of trees, birds, and flowers, factures they already know how to perceptually identify, and then infer (conclude), on the basis of what they see, and under the guidance of more expert observers, that its an oak a finch or a geranium. But the experts (and we are all experts on many aspects of our familiar surroundings) do not typically go through such a process. The expert just sees that its an oak, a finch or a geranium. The perceptual knowledge of the expert is still dependent, of course, since even an expert cannot see what kind of flower it is if she cannot first see its colour and shape, but it is to say, that the expert has developed identificatory skills that no longer require the sort of conscious inferential process that characterize a beginner’s efforts.

Coming to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’ obviously requires some background assumption on the part of the observer, an assumption to the effect that ‘a’ is ‘F’ (or perhaps only probable ‘F’) when ‘b’ is ‘G’. If one does not assume (as taken to be granted) that the gauge is properly connected, and does not, thereby assume that it would not register ‘empty’,unless the tank was nearly empty, then even if one could see that it registered ‘empty’, one would not learn ( hence, would not see) that one needed gas. At least, one would not see it by consulting the gauge. Likewise, in trying to identify birds, its no use being able to see their markings if one doesn’t know something about which birds have which marks ~ sometimes of the form: A bird with these markings is (probably) a finch.

It would seem, moreover, that these background assumptions, if they are to yield knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, as they must if the observer is to see (by b’s being ‘G’) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, must themselves qualify as knowledge. For if this background fact is not known, if it is not known whether ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’, then the knowledge of b’s being ‘G’, taken by itself, powerless to generate the knowledge that ‘a; is ‘F?’. If the conclusion is to be known to be true, both the premises used to reach that conclusion must be known to be true. Or so it would seem.

Externalism/Internalism are most generally accepted of this distinction if that a theory of justification is internalist, if and only if it requires that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person. Internal to his cognitive perspective, and external, if it allows that, at least, part of the justifying factor need not be thus accessible, so they can be external to the believers’ cognitive perspective, beyond his understanding. As complex issues well beyond our perception to the knowledge or an understanding, however, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalist and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any very explicit explication.

The externalism/internalism distinction has been mainly applied to theories of epistemic justification. It has also been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and in a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought content.

The internalist requirement of cognitive accessibility can be interpreted in at least two ways: A strong version of internalism required that the believer actually be aware of the justifying factor in order to be justified: While a weaker version would require only that he be capable of becoming aware of them by focussing his attention appropriately, but without the need for any change of position, new information etc. Though the phrase ‘cognitively accessible’ suggests the weak for internalism, wherefore, the idea that epistemic justification requires that the believer actually have in his cognitive possession a reason for thinking that the belief is true.

It should be carefully noticed that when internalism is construed by either that the justifying factors literally are internal mental states of the person or that the internalism. On whether actual awareness of the justifying elements or only the capacity to become aware of them is required, comparatively, the consistency and usually through a common conformity brings upon some coherentists views that could also be internalist, if both the belief and other states with which a justification belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible. In spite of its apparency, it is necessary, because on at least some views, e.g., a direct realist view of perception, something other than a mental state of the believer can be cognitively accessible, not sufficient, because there are views according to which at least, some mental states need not be actual (strong versions) or even possible (weak versions) objects of cognitive awareness.

Obviously too, a view that was externalist in relation to a strong version of internalism (by not requiring that the believer actually be aware of all justifying factors) could still be internalist in relation to a weak version (by requiring that, at least, be capable of becoming aware of them).

The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of ‘reliabilism’, whose main requirement for justification is roughly that the beliefs be produced in a way or to a considerable degree in which of subject matter conducting a process that makes of objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless, be epistemically justified in accepting it. Thus, such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps, even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.

An alterative to giving an externalist account of epistemic justification, one which may be more defensible while still accommodating many of the same motivating concerns, is especially given to some externalists account of knowledge directly, without relying on an intermediate account of justification. Such a view will obviously have to reject the justified true belief account of knowledge, holding instead that knowledge is true belief which satisfies the chosen externalist condition, e.g., is a result of a reliable process, and, perhaps, further conditions as well. This makes it possible for such a view to retain an internalist account of epistemic justification, though the centralities are seriously diminished. Such an externalist account of knowledge can accommodate the common-sense conviction that animals, young children and unsophisticated adults possess knowledge though not the weaker conviction that such individuals are epistemically justified in their belief. It is also, at least. Vulnerable to internalist counter-examples, since the intuitions involved there pertains more clearly to justification than to knowledge, least of mention, as with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. An objection to externalist accounts of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the content of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. So, then, the adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem as if part of all of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirements for justification.

To understand the way this is supposed to work, consider an ordinary example, ‘S’ identifies a banana (learns that it is a banana) by noting its shape and colour ~ perhaps, even tasting and smelling it (to make sure its not wax). In this case the perceptual knowledge that is a banana is (the direct realist admits) indirect, dependence on S’s perceptual knowledge of its shape, colour, smell, and taste. ‘S’ learns that it is a banana by seeing that it is yellow, banana-shaped, etc. Nonetheless, S’s perception of the banana’s colour and shape is direct. ‘S’ does not see that the object is yellow, for example, by seeing, knowing, believing anything more basic ~ either about the banana or anything else, e.g., his own sensations of the banana. ‘S’ has learned to identify such features, of course, but when ‘S’ learned to do is not an inference, even a unconscious inference, from other things be believes. What ‘S’ acquired was a cognitive skill, a disposition to believe of yellow objects he saw that they were yellow. The exercise of this skill does not require, and in no way depends on having of any other beliefs. S’s identificatorial successes will depend on his operating in certain special conditions, of course, ‘S’ will not, perhaps, be able to visually identify yellow objects in drastically reduced lighting, at funny viewing angles, or when afflicted with certain nervous disorders. But these facts about ‘S’ can see that something is yellow does not show that his perceptual knowledge (that ‘a’ is yellow) in any way deepens on a belief )let alone knowledge) that he is in such special conditions. It merely shows that direct perceptual knowledge is the result of exercising a skill, an identificatorial skill, that like any skill,. Requires certain conditions for its successful exercise. An expert basketball player cannot shoot accurately in a hurricane. He needs normal conditions to do what he has learned to do. So also, with individuals who have developed perceptual (cognitive) skills. They need normal conditions to do what they have learned to do. They need normal conditions to see, for example, that something is yellow. But they do not, any more than the basketball player, have to know they are in these conditions to do what being in these conditions enables them to do.

This means, of course, that for a direct realist direct perceptual knowledge is fallible and corrigible. Whether ‘S’ sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ depends on his being caused to believe that ’a’ is ‘F’ in conditions that are appropriate for an exercise of that cognitive skill. If conditions are right, then ‘S’ sees (hence, knows) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If they aren’t he doesn’t. Whether or not ‘S’ knows depends, then, not on what else, if anything, ‘S’ believes, but on the circumferences in which ‘S’ comes to believe. This being so, this type of direct realism is a form of externalism, direct perception of objective facts, pure perceptual knowledge of external events, is made possible because what is needed, by way of justification for such knowledge has been reduced. Background knowledge ~ and, in particular, the knowledge that the experience does, and suffices for knowing ~ is not needed.

This means that the foundations of knowledge are fallible. Nonetheless, though fallible, they are in no way derived. That is what makes them foundations. Even if they are brittle, as foundations sometimes are, everything else rests upon them

The theory of representative realism holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of us and of our perceptual experience of it, and (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself:

Clause 1. Makes representative realism a species of realism.

Clause 2. Makes it a species of causal theory of perception.

Clause 3. Makes it a species of representative as opposed

to direct realism.

Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. Its act/object analysis is traditionally a major plank in arguments for representative realism. According to the act/object analysis of experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects (whatever is perceived), but also to experiences like hallucinations and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences nonetheless, appear to represent something,. And their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which have been treated as properties, Meinongian objects (which may not exist or have any form of being), and, more commonly, private mental entities with sensory qualities. (The term ‘sense-data’ is now usually applied to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects of sense experiences, as in the work of G.E. Moore.) Act/object theorists may also differ on the relationship between objects of experience and objects of perception. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘indirectly aware’). Meinongians, however, may simply treat objects of perception as existing objects of experience.

Realism in any area of thought is the doctrine that certain entities allegedly associated with that area are indeed real. Common sense realism ~ sometimes called ‘realism’, without qualification ~ says that ordinary things like chairs and trees and people are real. Scientific realism says that theoretical posits like electrons and fields of force and quarks are equally real. And psychological realism says mental states like pain and beliefs are real. Realism can be upheld ~ and opposed ~ in all such areas, as it can with differently or more finely drawn provinces of discourse: For example, with discourse about colours, about the past, about possibility and necessity, or about matters of moral right and wrong. The realist in any such area insists on the reality of the entities in question in the discourse.

If realism itself can be given a fairly quick characterization, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of opposition, for they are abound in. Some opponents deny that there are any distinctive posits associated with the area of discourse under dispute: A good example is the emotivist doctrine that moral discourse does not posit values but serves only, like applause and exclamation, to express feelings. Other opponents deny that entities posited by the relevant discourse exist, or, at least, exists independently of our thinking about them: Here the standard example is ‘idealism’. And others again, insist that the entities associated with the discourse in question are tailored to our human capacities and interests and, to that extent, are as much a product of invention as a matter of discovery.

Nevertheless, one us e of terms such as ‘looks’, ‘seems’, and ‘feels’ is to express opinion. ‘It looks as if the Conservative Party will win the next election’ expresses an opinion about the party’s chances and does not describe a particular kind of perceptual experience. We can, however, use such terms to describe perceptual experience divorced from any opinion to which the experience may incline us. A straight-stick half in water looks bent, and does so to people completely familiar with this illusion who has, therefore, no inclination to hold that the stick is in fact bent. Such users of ‘looks’, ‘seems’, ‘taste’, etc. are commonly called ‘phenomenological’.

The act/object theory holds that the sensory experience recorded by sentence employing sense is a matter of being directly acquainted with something which actually bears the red to me. I am acquainted with a red expanse (in my visual field): When something tastes bitter to me I am directly acquainted with a sensation with the property of being bitter, and so on and so forth. (If you do not understand the term ‘directly acquainted’, stick a pin into your finger. The relation you will then bear to your pain, as opposed to the relation of concern you might bear to another’s pain when told about it, is an instance e of direct acquaintance e in the intended sense.)

The act/object account of sensory experience combines with various considerations traditionally grouped under the head of the argument for illusion to provide arguments for representative realism, or more precisely for the clause in it that contents that our senorily derived information about the world comes indirectly, that what we are most directly acquainted with is not an aspect of the world but an aspect for our mental sensory responses to it. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned refractive illusion, that of a straight stick in water looking bent. The act/object account holds that in this case we are directly acquainted with a bent shape. This shape, so the argument runs, cannot be the stick as it is straight, and thus, must be a mental item, commonly called a sense-datum. And, ion general sense-data-visual, tactual, etc. ~ is held to be the objects of direct acquaintance. Perhaps the most striking uses of the act/object analysis to bolster representative realism turns on what modern science tells us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. Modern science tells us that the objects of the physical world around us are literally made up of enormously many, widely separated, tiny particles whose nature can be given in terms of a small number of properties like mass, charge, spin and so on. (These properties are commonly called the primary qualities, as primary and secondary qualities represent a metaphysical distinction with which really belong to objects in the world and qualities which only appear to belong to them, or which human beings only believe to belong to them, because of the effects those objects produce ion human beings, typically through the sense organs, that is to say, something that does not hold everywhere by nature, but is producing in or contributed by human beings in their interaction with a world which really contains only atoms of certain kinds in a void. To think that some objects in the world are coloured, or sweet ort bitter is to attribute to objects qualities which on this view they do not actually possess. Rather, it is only that some of the qualities which are imputed to objects, e.g., colour, sweetness,

bitterness, which are not possessed by those objects. But, of course, that is not how the objects look to us, not how they present to our senses. They look continuous and coloured. What then, can be these coloured expanses with which we are directly acquainted be other than mental sense-data?

Two objections dominate the literature on representative realism: One goes back to Berkeley (1685-1753) and is that representative realism lead straight to scepticism about the external world, the other is that the act/object account of sensory awareness is to be rejected in favour of an adverbial account.

Traditional representative realism is a ‘veil of perception’ doctrine, in Bennett’s (1971) phrase. Lock e’s idea (1632-1704) was that the physical world was revealed by science to be in essence colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent and that we perceive it by, to put it metaphorically, throwing a veil over it by means of our senses. It is the veil we see, in the strictest sense of ‘see’. This does not mean that we do not really see the objects around us. It means that we see an object in virtue of seeing the veil, the sense-data, causally related in the right way to that object, an obvious question to ask, therefore, is what justifies us in believing that there is anything behind the veil, and if we are somehow justified in believing that there is something behind the veil,. How can we be confident of what it is like?

One intuition that lies at the heart of the realist’s account of objectivity is that, in the last analysis, the objectivity of a belief is to be explained by appeal to the independent existence of the entities it concerns: Epistemological objectivity, this is, is to b e analysed in terms of ontological notions of objectivity. A judgement or beliefs is epistemological notions of objectivity, if and only if it stands in some specified reflation to an independently existing determinate reality. Frége (1848-1925), for example, believed that arithmetic could comprise objective knowledge only if the numbers it refers to, the propositions it consists of, the functions it employs, and the truth-values it aims at, are all mind-independent entities. And conversely, within a realist framework, to show that the members of a given class of judgements are merely subjective, it is sufficient to show that there exists no independent reality that those judgements characterize or refer to.

Thus, it is favourably argued that if values are not part of the fabric of the world, then moral subjectivity is inescapable. For the realist, the, of epistemological notions of objectivity is to be elucidated by appeal to the existence of determinate facts, objects, properties, events and the like, which exit or obtain independent of any cognitive access we may have to them. And one of the strongest impulses toward platonic realism ~ the theoretical commitment to the existence of abstract objects like sets, numbers, and propositions ~ stems from the widespread belief that only if such things exist in their own right can we allow that logic, arithmetic and science are indeed objective. Though ‘Platonist’ realism in a sense accounts for mathematical knowledge, it postulates such a gulf between both the ontology and the epistemology of science and that of mathematics that realism is often said to make the applicability of mathematics in natural science into an inexplicable mystery

This picture is rejected by anti-realists. The possibility that our beliefs and theories are objectively true is not, according to them, capable of being rendered intelligible by invoking the nature and existence of reality as it is in and of itself. If our conception of epistemological objective notions is minimal, requiring only ‘presumptive universality’, then alternative, non-realist analysers of it can seem possible ~ and eve n attractive. Such analyses have construed the objectivity of an arbitrary judgement as a function of its coherence with other judgements, of its possession of grounds that warrant it,. Of its conformity to the a prior rules that constitute understanding, of its verifiability (or falsifiability), or if its permanent presence in the mind of God. On e intuitive common to a variety of different anti-realist theories is such that for our assertions to be objective, for our beliefs to comprise genuine knowledge, those assertions and beliefs must be, among other things, rational, justifiable, coherent, communicable and intelligible. But it is hard, the anti-realist claims, to see how such properties as these can be explained by appeal to entities as they are on and of themselves. On the contrary, according to most forms of anti-realism, it is only the basis of ontological subjective notions like ‘the way reality seems to us’, ‘the evidence that is available to us’, ‘the criteria we apply’, ‘the experience we undergo’ or ‘the concepts we have acquired’ that epistemological notions of objectivity of our beliefs can possibly be explained.

The reason by which a belief is justified must be accessible in principle to the subject hold that belief, as Externalists deny this requirement, proposing that this makes knowing too difficult to achieve in most normal contexts. The internalist-Externalists debate is sometimes also viewed as a debate between those who think that knowledge can be naturalized (Externalists) and those who do not (internalist) naturalists hold that the evaluative notions used in epistemology can be explained in terms of non-evaluative concepts ~ for example, that justification can be explained in terms of something like reliability. They deny a special normative realm of language that is theoretically different from the kinds of concepts used in factual scientific discourse. Non-naturalists deny this and hold to the essential difference between normative and the factual: The former can never be derived from or constituted by the latter. So internalists tend to think of reason and rationality as non-explicable in natural, descriptive terms, whereas, Externalists think such an explanation is possible.

Although the reason, . . . to what we think to be the truth. The sceptic uses an argumentive strategy to show the alternatives strategies that we do not genuinely have knowledge and we should therefore suspend judgement. But, unlike the sceptics, many other philosophers maintain that more than one of the alternatives are acceptable and can constitute genuine knowledge. However, it seems dubitable to have invoked hypothetical sceptics in their work to explore the nature of knowledge. These philosophers did no doubt that we have knowledge, but thought that by testing knowledge as severely as one can, one gets clearer about what counts as knowledge and greater insight results. Hence there are underlying differences in what counts as knowledge for the sceptic and other philosophical appearances. As traditional epistemology has been occupied with dissassociative kinds of debate that led to a dogmatism. Various types of beliefs were proposed as candidates for sceptic-proof knowledge, for example, those beliefs that are immediately derive by many as immune to doubt. Nevertheless, that they all had in common was that empirical knowledge began with the data of the senses, that this was safe from scepticism and that a further superstructure of knowledge was to be built on this firm basis.

It might well be observed that this reply to scepticism fares better as a justification for believing in the existence of external objects, than as a justification of the views we have about their nature. It is incredible that nothing independent of us is responsible for the manifest patterns displayed by our sense-data, but granting this leaves open many possibilities about the nature of the hypnotized external reality. Direct realists often make much of the apparent advantage that their view has in the question of the nature of the external world. The fact of the matter is, though, that it is much harder to arrive at tenable views about the nature of external reality than it is to defend the view that there is an external reality of some kind or other. The history of human thought about the nature of the external world is littered with what are now seen (with the benefit of hindsight) to be egregious errors ~ the four element theory, phlogiston, the crystal spheres, vitalism, and so on. It can hardly be an objection to a theory that makes the question of the nature of external reality much harder than the question of its existence.

Contemporary philosophy of mind, following cognitive science, uses the term ‘representation’ to mean just about anything that can be semantically evaluated. Thus, representations may be said to be true, to refer, to be accurate, and so forth. Representation thus conceived comes in many varieties. The most familiar are pictures, three-dimensional models, e.g., statues, scale model, linguistic text (including mathematical formulas) and various hybrids of these such as diagrams, maps, graphs and tables. It is an open question in cognitive science whether mental representation, which is our real topic, but at which time it falls within any of these or any-other familiar provinces.

The representational theory of cognition and thought is uncontroversial in contemporary cognitive science that cognitive processes are processes that manipulate representations. This idea seems nearly inevitable. What makes the difference between processes that are cognitive-solving a problem, say and those that are not-a patellar reflex, for example-is just that cognitive processes are epistemically assessable? A solution procedure can be justified or correct, as a reflex cannot. Since only things with content can be epistemically assessed, processes appear to count as cognitive only in so far as they implicate representations.

It is tempting to think that thoughts are the mind’s representations: Are not thoughts just those mental states that have semantic content? This is, no doubt, harmless enough provided we keep in mind that cognitive science may attribute to thought’s properties and contents that are foreign too common-sense. First, most of the representations hypothesized by cognitive science do not correspond to anything common-sense would recognize as thoughts. Standard psycholinguistic theory, for instance, hypothesizes the construction of representations of the syntactic structures of the utterances one hears and understands. Yet we are not aware of, and non-specialists do not even understand, the structures represented. Thus, cognitive science may attribute thoughts where common-sense would not. Second, cognitive science may find it useful to individuate thoughts in ways foreign too common-sense.

However, concepts occupy mental states having content: A belief may have the content that I will catch the train, or a hope may have the content that the prime minister will resign. A concept is something which is capable of being a constituent of such contents. More specifically, a concept is a way of thinking of something-a particular object, or property, or relation, or some other entity.

Several different concepts may each be ways of thinking of the same object. A person may think of himself in the first-person pronoun, or think of himself as the spouse of Julie Smith, or as the person located in a certain room now. More generally, a concept ‘c’ is such-and-such, without believing ‘d’ is such-and-such. As words can be combined to form structured sentences, concepts have also been conceived as combinable into structured complex contents. When these complex contents are expressed in English by ‘that . . . ‘ clauses, as in our opening examples, they will be capable of being true or false, depending on the way the world is.

A fundamental question for philosophy is: What individuates a given concept-that is, what makes it the one it is, than any other concept? One answer, which has been developed in great detail, is that it is impossible to give a non-trivial answer to this question (Schiffer, 1987). An alternative approach, favoured by most, addresses the question by starting from the idea that a concept is individuated by the condition which must be satisfied if a thinker is to possess that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other contributing attributes whose contents contain it as a constituent. So, to take a simple case, one could propose that the logical concept -‘and’- is individuated by this condition: It is the unique concept ‘C’ to posses which a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basing them on any further inference or information: From any two premisses ‘A’ and ‘B’, ‘ABC’ can be inferred, and from any premiss ‘ABC’, each, of ‘A’ and ‘B’ can be inferred. Again, a relatively observational concept such as ‘round’ can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker finds specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are not based on perception to those judgements that are. A statement which individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to possess it can be described as giving the ‘possession condition’ for the concept.

A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for ‘and’, does not. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experiences, least of mention, to which have to be made in defence of the possession conditions for relatively observational concepts. What we must avoid is mention of the concept in question as such within the content of the attributes attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposed possession of the concept in an account which was meant to elucidate its possession. In talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That a thinker’s mastery of a concept is inextricably tied to how he finds it natural to go on in new cases in applying the concept.

Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering the others. Two of the families which plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of some simple concepts 0, 1, 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers there are 0, so-and-so’s, there is 1 so-and-so, . . . , and the family consisting of the concepts ‘belief’ and ‘desire’. Such families have come to be known as ‘local holism’. A local holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demands that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form: Belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for a thinker to poses them are to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For these and other possession conditions to individuate properly, it is necessary that there be some ranking of the concept treated. The possession conditions for concepts higher in the ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower levels in the ranking.

A possession condition may in various way’s make a thinker’s possession of a particular concept dependent on or upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world for being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to the subject’s environment. If this is so, then mention of such experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that concept dependent in part upon the environmental relations to the thinker. Burge (1979) has also argued from intuitions about particular examples that, even though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition which properly individuates such a concept must take into account his linguistic relations.

Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kripke. For any judgement whose content involves a given concept, there is a ‘correctness condition’ for that judgement, a condition which is dependent in part on or upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into the territory of a thinker’s reasons for making judgements. A thinker’s visual perception can give him good reason for judging ‘That man is bald’; even if the man he sees is Rostropovich. All these normative connections must be explained by a theory of concepts. One approach to these matters is to look to the possession condition for a concept, and consider how the referent of the concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent of the concept is that object, or property, or function . . . which makes the practices of judgement and inference in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessarily good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permits us to say what it is about a thinker’s previous judgements that make it the case that he is employing one concept than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would also allow us to say how the correctness condition is determined for a judgement in which the concept is applied to newly encountered objects. The judgement is correct if the new object had the property which in fact makes the judgement practices in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.

What is more that innate ideas have been variously defined by philosophers either as ideas consciously presented, to the mind prior to sense experience (the-dispositional sense), or as ideas which we have an innate disposition to form, though we need not be actually aware of them at any particular time, e.g., as babies ~ in cases in a dispositional sense?

Understood in either way they were invoked to account for our recognition of certain truths without recourse to experiential truths without recourse verification, such as those of mathematics, or justify certain moral and religious claims which were held to be capable of being known by introspection of our innate ideas. Examples of such supposed truths might include ‘murder is wrong’ or ‘God exists’.

One difficulty with the doctrine is that it is sometimes formulated as one about concepts or ideas which are held to be innate and at other times as one about a source of propositional knowledge. In so far as concepts are taken to be innate, the doctrine relates primarily to claim about meaning: Our idea of God, for example, is taken as a source for the meaning of the word God. When innate ideas are understood propositionally, supposed innateness is taken as evidence for their truth. However, this clearly rests the assumption that innate prepositions have an unimpeachable source, usually taken to be God, but then any appeal to innate ideas to justify the existence of God is circular. Despite such difficulties the doctrine of innate ideas had a long and influential history until the eighteenth century and the concept has in recent decades been revitalized through its employment in Noam Chomsky’s influential account of the mind’s linguistic capabilities.

The attraction of the theory has been felt strongly by those philosophers who have been unable to give an alternative account of our capacity to recognize that some proposition cannot be justified solely on the basis of an appeal to sense experience. Wherefore, Plato argued that, for example, recognition of mathematical truths could only be explained on the assumption of some form of recollection. Since there was no plausible post-natal source the recollection must refer back to a pre-natal acquisition of knowledge. Thus understood, the doctrine of innate ideas supposed the thoughts that there were important truths innate in human beings and the senses hindered their proper apprehension.

The ascetic implications of the doctrine were important in Christian philosophy throughout the Middle Ages and the doctrine featured powerfully in scholastic teaching until its displacement by Locke’s philosophy in the eighteenth century. It had in the meantime acquired modern expression in the philosophy of Descartes who argued that we can come to know certain important truths before we have any empirical knowledge at all. Our ideas of God, for example, and our coming to recognize that God must necessarily exist, are, Descartes held, logically independent of sense experience. In England the Cambridge Platonists such as Henry Moore and Ralph Cudworth added considerable support.

Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and his alternative empiricist account was powerful enough to displace the doctrine from philosophy almost totally. Leibniz, in his critique of Locke, attempted to defend it with a sophisticated dispositional version of the theory, but it attracted few followers.

The empiricist alternative to innate ideas as an explanation of the certainty of propositions was in the direction of construing all necessary truths as analytic. Kant’s refinement of the classification of propositions with the fourfold distinction, analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori did nothing to encourage a return to the innate idea’s doctrine, which slipped from view. The doctrine may fruitfully be understood as the production of confusion between explaining the genesis of ideas or concepts and the basis for regarding some propositions as necessarily true.

Nevertheless, according to Kant, our knowledge arises from two fundamentally different faculties of the mind, sensibility and understanding. He criticized his predecessors for running these faculties together. Leibniz for treating sensing as a confused mode of understanding and Locke for treating understanding as an abstracted mode of sensing. Kant held that each of the faculties operates with its own distinctive type of mental representation. Concepts, the instruments of the understanding, are mental representations that apply potentially to many things in virtue of their possession of a common feature. Intuitions, the instrument of sensibility, are representations that refer to just one thing and to that thing is played in Russell’s philosophy by ‘acquaintance’ though intuition’s objects are given to us, Kant said; ‘Through concepts they are thought’.

Nonetheless, it is famous Kantian Thesis that knowledge is yielded neither by intuitions nor by concepts alone, but only by the two in conjunction, ‘Thoughts without content are empty’, he says in an often quoted remark, and ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’. Exactly what Kant means by the remark is a debated question, however, answered in different ways by scholars who bring different elements of Kant’s text to bear on it. A minimal reading is that it is only propositionally structured knowledge that requires the collaboration of intuition and concept: This view allows that intuitions without concepts constitute some kind of non-judgmental awareness. A stronger reading is that it is reference or intentionality that depends on intuition and concept together, so that the blindness of intuition without concept is its referring to an object. A more radical view, yet is that intuitions without concepts are indeterminate, a mere blur, perhaps nothing at all. This last interpretation, though admittedly suggested by some things Kant says, is at odds with his official view about the separation of the faculties.

Least that ‘content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation had that makes it semantically evaluable. Wherefore, a statement is sometimes said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content, whereby its term is sometimes said to have a concept as its content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have: A representation’s content is just whatever it is underwrite is its semantic evaluation

One difficulty with the doctrine is that it is sometimes formulated as one about concepts or ideas which are held to be innate and at other times as one about a source of propositional knowledge. In so far as concepts are taken to be innate, the doctrine relates primarily to claim about meaning: Our idea of God, for example, is taken as a source for the meaning of the word God. When innate ideas are understood propositionally, their supposed innateness is taken as evidence for their truth. However, this clearly rests the assumption that innate prepositions have a source, usually taken to be God, but then any appeal to innate ideas to justify the existence of God is circular. Despite such difficulties the doctrine of innate ideas had a long and influential history until the eighteenth century and the concept has in recent decades been revitalized through its employment in Noam Chomsky’s influential account of the mind’s linguistic capabilities.

Least that ‘content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation had that makes it semantically evaluable. Wherefore, a statement is sometimes said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content, whereby its term is sometimes said to have a concept as its content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have: A representation’s content is just whatever it is underwrite is its semantic evaluation.

According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such is the case, others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entails psychological certainty. Nonetheless, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These argument s are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief, or a facsimile, are mutually incompatible (the incompatibility thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, however, the two may also coexist of the separability thesis.

The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible (in the ‘Republic’). Nonetheless this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.

A.Duncan-Jones cites linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people oftentimes say ‘I don’t believe she is guilty. ‘I know she is’, where ‘just’ makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: ‘You didn’t hurt him, you killed him’.

H.A. Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis which hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty, as both infallibility and psychological certitude gives the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that knowledge never does, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, Prichard gives us no-good reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, only to suggest that we are completely confident is bizarre.

A.D.Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley’s version which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief, whereas knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although knowledge might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley’s remarks that the test of whether I know something is ‘what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions’. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, ‘I am unsure whether my answer is true, still, I know its correct’. Nonetheless, this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim, such as a claim to know something, and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While ‘I know such and such’ might be true even if I am sure of whether such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.

Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Radford’s view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example, which Walter has forgotten that he learned some English history years prior and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur’? Since he forgo t that he took history, he considers his correct responses to be no more than guesses. Nonetheless, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A fortiori he would deny being sure, or having the right to be sure, that, nonetheless that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would nonetheless insist that Walter knows when the Battle occurred, since clearly he remembered the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Walter to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, least of mention, that Woozley attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least, believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is, intentionally misleading’.

Those who agree with Radford’s defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Walter lack’s beliefs about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture since Walter does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when he seeks them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting the Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviorist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bain’s (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and hasn’t Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Walter gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviorist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.

D.M.Armstrong (1973) takes a different tack against Radford, Walter does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that point, however, Armstrong suggests that Walter believes that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. What is more that Armstrong insists, Walter also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066? After-all, had Walter been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and had he forgotten being ‘taught’ this and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 1066, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Walter’s false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted as a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radford’s original case as one in which Walter’s true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Wherefore, Walter consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to claim that knowledge entails belief.

Armstrong’s response to Radford was to reject Radford’s claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee lacks the knowledge Radford attributes to him. If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Walter believes both that 1066 is and that is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Walter knowledge on the grounds that people who believe the denial of what they believe cannot be aid to know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to liken the examinee case to examples of ignorance given in recent attacks on ‘externalisms’. This account of knowledge (needless to say, externalists themselves would tend not to favour this strategy). Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1895): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. Again, for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the President is in New York, even though she has every reason to believe that the President is in Washington, D.C. In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she arrived at her belief about the whereabouts of the President through the power of her clairvoyance. Yet, surely Samantha’s belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the President is. But, Radford’s examinee is little different. Even if Walter lacks the belief which Radford denies him, Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Walter’s memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, Walter has every reason to suppose that his response is merely guesswork, and so he has every reason to consider his belief as false. His belief would be an irrational one, and wherefore, one about whose truth Walter would be ignorant.

The externalism/internalism distinction has been mainly applied if it requires that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalist and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any explicit explication. Also, it has been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and in a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought content.

Perhaps the clearest example of an internalist position would be a foundationalist view according to which foundational beliefs pertain to immediately experienced states of mind and other beliefs are justified by standing in cognitively accessible logical or inferential relations to such foundational beliefs. Similarly, a coherentist view could also be internalist, if both he beliefs or other states with which a justificadum belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible.

Also, on this way of drawing the distinction, a hybrid view to which some of the factors required for justification must be cognitively accessible while others need not and in general will not be, would count as an externalists view. Noticeably, its view that was externalist in relation to forms or versions of internalist, that by not requiring that the believer actually be aware of all justifying factors could still be internalist in relation for which requiring that he at least be capable of becoming aware of them.

The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of reliabilism, whose main requirement for justification is roughly that the belief be produced in a way or via a process that makes it objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless be epistemically justified in accepting it. Thus such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, rather than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply charged the subject.

As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy of language more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, and so forth. That motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief or thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatory criteria employed by the experts in his social group, and so forth. , -not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.

An objection to externalist accounts of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors pertaining to the environment, the n knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors-which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.

The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist account of justification: That, if part or all of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to the content and the status of that content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible: Thus contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else: But such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.

If the world is radically different from the way it appears, to the pointy that apparent epistemic vices are actually truth-conducive, presumably his should not make us retrospectively term such vices ‘virtues’ even if they are and have always been truth-conducive. Suggestively, it would simply make the epistemic virtue qualities which a truth-desiring person would want to have. For even if, unbeknown to us, some wild sceptical possibility is realized, this would not affect our desires (it being, again, unknown). Such a characterization, moreover, it would seem to fit the virtues in our catalogue. Almost by definition, the truth-desiring person would want to be epistemically conscientious. And, given what seem to be the conditions pertaining to human life and knowledge, the truth-desiring person will also want to have the previously cited virtues of impartiality and intellectual courage.

Are, though, truth and the avoidance of error rich enough desires for the epistemically virtuous? Arguably not. For one thing, the virtuous inquirer aims not so much at having true beliefs as at discovering truths-a very different notions. Perpetual reading of a good encyclopaedia will expand my bank of true beliefs without markedly increasing human-kinds basic stock of truths. For Aristotle, too, one notes that true belief is not, as such, even a concern: The concern, is the discovery of scientific or philosophical truth. But, of course, the mere expansion of our bank of truths-even of scientific and philosophical truths-is not itself the complete goal of its present. Rather one looks for new truths of an appropriate kind-rich, deep, explanatorily fertile, say. By this reckoning, then, the epistemically virtuous person seeks at least three related, but separate ends, to discover new truths, to increase one’s explanatory understanding, to have true than false beliefs.

Another important area of concern for epistemologists is the relation between epistemic virtue and epistemic justification. Obviously, an epistemically virtuous person must itself, I take it, be virtuous. But is a virtuously formed belief automatically a justified one? I would hold that if a belief is virtuously formed, this fully justifies that person in having it: However, the belief itself may lack adequate justification, as the evidence for it may be, through no fault of this person, still inadequate. Different philosophers on this point or points, are, however, apparently to have different intuitions.

Hegel’s theory of justification contains both ‘externalist’ and ‘coherentist’ elements. He recognizes that some justification is provided by percepts and beliefs being generated reliably by our interaction with the environment. Hegel contends that full justification additionally requires a self-conscious, reflective comprehension of one’s beliefs and experiences which integrate them into a systematic conceptual scheme which provides an account for them which is both coherent and reflexively self-consistent.

Hegel contends that the corrigibility of conceptual categories is a social phenomenon. Our partial ignorance about the world can be revealed and corrected because one and the same claim or principle can be applied, asserted and assessed by different people in the same context or by the same person in different contexts. Hegal’s theory of justification requires that an account be shown to e adequate to its domain and to be superior to its alternatives. In this regard, Hegal is a fallibility according to whom justification is provisional and ineluctably historical, since it occurs against the background of less adequate alternative views.

Meanwhile, one important difference between the sceptical approach and more traditional ones becomes plain when the two are applied to sceptical questions. On the classical view, if we are to explain how knowledge is possible, it is illegitimate to make use of the resources of science, this would simply beg the question against the sceptic by making use of the very knowledge which he calls into question. Thus, Descartes’ attempt to answer the sceptic begins by rejecting all those beliefs about which any doubt is possible. Descartes must respond to the sceptic from a starting place which includes no beliefs at all. Naturalistic epistemologists, however, understand the demand to explain the possibility of knowledge differently. As Quine argues, sceptical question arise from within science. It is precisely our success in understanding the world, and thus, in seeing that appearance nd reality may differ, that raises the sceptical question in the first place. We may thus legitimately use the resources of science to answer the question which science itself has raised. The question about how knowledge is possible should it be construed as an empirical question: It is a question about how creatures such as we (given what our best current scientific theories tell us we are like) may come to have our best current scientific theories tell us the world is like. Quine suggests that the Darwinian account of the origin of species gives a very general explanation of why it is that we should be well adapted to getting true beliefs about our environment, while an examination of human psychology will fill the details of such an account. Although Quine himself does not suggest it, and so, investigations in the sociology of knowledge are obviously relevant as well.

This approach to sceptical questions clearly makes them quite tractable, and its proponents see this, understandably, as an important advantage of the naturalistic approach. It is in part for this reason that current work in psychology and sociology is under such close scrutiny by many epistemologists. By the same token, the detractors of the naturalistic approach argue that this way of dealing with sceptical questions simply bypasses the very questions which philosophers have long dealt with. Far from answering the traditional sceptical question it is argued, the naturalistic approach merely changes the topic. Debates between naturalistic epistemologists and their critics, in that frequently focus on whether this new way of doing epistemology adequately answers, transforms or simply ignores the questions which others see as central to epistemological inquiry. Some see the naturalistic approach as an attempt to abandon the philosophical study of knowledge entirely.

In thinking about the possibilities that we bear on in mind, our conscious states, according to Franz Brentano (1838-1917), are all objects of ‘inner perception’. Every such state is such that, for the person who is in that state, it is evident to that person that he or she is in that state, least of mention, that each of our conscious states is not an object of an act of perception, wherefore the doctrine does not lead to an infinite regress.

Brentano holds that there are two types of conscious state-those that are ‘physical’ and those are ‘intentional’ a ‘physical’, or sensory, state is a sensation or sense-impression-a qualitative individual composed of parts that are spatially related to each other. ‘Intentional’ states, e.g., believing, considering, hoping, desiring which are characterized by the facts that (1) they are ‘directed upon objects’. (2) objects may be ‘directed upon’, e.g., we may fear things that do not exist, and (3) such states are not sensory. There is no sensation, no sensory individual, that can be identified with any particular intentional attitude.

Following Leibniz, Brentano distinguishes two types of certainty: The certainty we can have with respect to the existence of our conscious states, and that a priori certainty that may be directed upon necessary truths. These two types of certainty may be combined in a significant way. At a given, moments I may be certain, on the basis of inner perception, that there is believing, desiring, hoping and fearing, and L may also be certain a priori that there cannot be believing, desiring, hoping, and fearing unless there is a ‘substance’ that believes, desires, hopes and fears. In such a case, it will be certain for me [as I will perceive] that there is a substance that believes, desires, hopes and fears. It is also axiomatic. Brentano says, that, if one is certain that a substance of a certain sort exists, then one is identical with that substance.

Brentano makes use of only two purely epistemic concepts, that of ‘being’ certain, or ‘evident’, and that of ‘being probable’. If a given hypothesis is probable, in the epistemic sense, for a particular person, then that person can be certain that the hypothesis is probable for him. Making use of the principles of probability, one may calculate the probability that a given hypothesis has on one’s evidence base.

Nonetheless, if our evidence-base is composed only of necessary truths and the facts of inner perception, then it is difficult to see how it could provide justification for any contingent truths other than those that pertain to states of consciousness. How could such an evidence-base even lend ‘probability’ to the hypothesis that there is a world of external physical things?

What, then, is the problem of the external world? Certainly it is not whether there is an external world as this is taken for granted. Instead, the problem is an epistemological one which, in a rough approximation, can be formulated by asking whether and if so how a person gains knowledge of the external world. However, the problem seems to admit of an easy solution. There is knowledge of the external world which persons acquire primarily by perceiving objects and events which make up the external world.

An epistemic argument would concede that the main reason for this in that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-inferential. It is claimed that perceptual knowledge that there is a brown and rectangular table before me, because I would not know such a proposition unless I knew that something then appeared brown and rectangular. Hence, knowledge of the table is dependent upon knowledge of how it appears. Alternately expressed, if there is knowledge of the table at all, it is indirect knowledge, secured only if the proposition about the table may be inferred from a preposition about appearances. If so, epistemological direct realism is false.

The significance of this emerges when one asks of a particular application that by what evidence or by what consideration is the best answer, clearly, is to question with which the argument will lead to the problems of the external world and the epistemological direct realism. That is, the crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon perceptual direct realism. The clear implication of the world perceived from the answer is ‘no’, we may point that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the object of appear is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is otherwise an attributing state with content. Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years’ old entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old (Chisholm, 1964). And there are countless other examples that are similarly like this one.

Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and he like. Such a move, moreover, requires an argument which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might possibly be.

If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing, perceptual direct realism will have been removed. So, that, there will no longer be any real motivation for the problem of the external world, of course, even if a perceptual direct realism is reinstated, this does not solve that the argument from illusion may suffice to refute all forms of perceptual realism. That problem, nonetheless, might arise even for one who accepts the perceptual direct realism, however, there is reason to be suspicious. What is not clear is whether the dependence is ‘epistemic’ or ‘semantic’. It is epistemic if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is for something to look blue. However, this may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependence relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about objects appear, but this fact does not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.

This criticism means that representational states used for the problem of the external world is narrow, in the sense that it focuses only on individual elements within the argument on which the argument seems to be used. Those assumptions, are foundationalist in character: Knowledge and justified belief are divided into the basic, immediate and non-inferential cases, and the non-basic, inferential knowledge and justified belief which is supported by the basic. That is to say, however, though foundationalism was widely assumed when the problem of the external world was given currency in Descartes and the classical empiricists. It has been readily challenged and there are in place well-worked alterative accounts to knowledge and justified belief, some of which seem to be plausible as the most tenable version of foundationalism. So we have some good reason to suspect, quite as one might have initially thought, that the problem of the external world just does not arise, at least not in the forms in which it has usually been presented.

In contrast with the possibility of asking and answering to questions is very closely bound up with the fact that the problem with the external world or direct realism takes place relative to or from a point or points of reference, which does or does not have an origin. In addition to this, the significance of this emerges when one asks, that an object is a unified and coherent segment of the perceived array that can be perceived as having certain properties and as standing in certain relations to other objects (such as the property of having a determinate shape.) One way of putting this distinction, derived ultimately by Alexius Meinong, whose intentional attitude that we ordinarily call ‘perceiving’ and ‘remembering’, provide ‘presumptive evidence’, that is to say, prima facie evidence-for their intentional objects. For example, believing that one is looking at a group of people tends to justify the belief that there is a group of people that one is looking at. How, then, are we to distinguish merely ‘prima facie’ justification from the real thing? This type of solution would seem to call for principles that specify, by reference to further facts of inner perception, the conditions under which merely prima facie justification may become real justification.

Those who speak of prima facie reasons may do so in either of two ways (1) we have a prima facie duty to keep our promise if every action if every action of promise-keeping is to that extent right-if all actions of promise-keeping are the better for it, and (2) an action may be a prima facie duty in virtue of some property it has, in this sense even though it is wrong overall, and so not a ‘duty proper’.

However, what is required is an account of simply describing developmental progress that can be gained or articulated by one’s thoughts. That for developmental considerations do circumscribe the form that such an account will take in virtue of logical positivism, but it cannot be conclusive until we have looked more closely at the bases on which the relevant and distinguishable contents make clear to accommodate a different thought from that to be the functional dynamic areas, from which strongly suggests that in the move from implicit to explicit understanding involves our developing ability than purely reactive, manifestation of the relevant representational abilities.

It was ‘positivism’ in its adherence to the doctrine the within the paradigm of science is the only form of knowledge and that there is nothing in the universe beyond what can in principle be scientifically known. It was ‘logical’ in its dependence on developments in logic and mathematics in the early years of this century which were taken to reveal how a priori knowledge of necessary truths is compatible with a thoroughgoing empiricism.

The exclusiveness of a scientific world-view was to be secured by showing that everything beyond the reach of science is strictly or ‘cognitively’ meaningless. In the sense of being incapable of truth or falsity, and so not a possible object of cognition. This required a criterion of meaninglessness, and it was found in the idea of empirical verification. A sentence is said to be cognitively meaningful if and only if it can be verified or falsified in experience. This is not meant to require that the sentence be conclusively verbified or falsified, since universal scientific laws or hypotheses (which are supposed to pass the test) are not logically deducible from any amount of actually observed evidence. The criterion is accordingly to be understood to require only verifiability or fallibility, in the sense of empirical evidence which would count either for or against the truth of the sentence in question, without having to logically imply it. Verification or confirmation is not necessarily something that can be carried out by the person who entertains the sentence or hypothesis in question, or even by anyone at all at the stage of intellectual and technological development achieved at the time it is entertained. A sentence is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is in principle empirically verifiable or falsifiable.

Anything which does not fulfil this criterion is declared literally meaningless. There is no significant ‘cognitive’ question as to its truth or falsity: It is not an appropriate object of enquiry. Moral and aesthetic and other ‘evaluative’ sentences are held to be neither confirmable nor disconfirmable on empirical grounds, and so are cognitively meaningless. They are, at best, expressions of feeling or preference which are neither true nor false. Whatever is cognitively meaningful and therefore factual is value-free. The positivists claimed that many of the sentences of traditional philosophy, especially those in what they called ‘metaphysics’, also lack cognitive meaning and say nothing that could be true or false. But they did not spend much time trying to show this in detail about the philosophy of the past. They were more concerned with developing a theory of meaning and of knowledge adequate to the understanding nd perhaps even the improvement of science.

Nevertheless, that our beliefs are not only in bodies, but also in persons, or themselves, which continue to exist through time, and this belief too can be explained only by the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’. We never directly perceive anything we can call ourselves: The most we can be aware of in ourselves are our constantly changing momentary perceptions, not the mind or self which has them. For Hume (1711-76), there is nothing that really binds the different perceptions together, we are led into the ‘fiction’ that they form a unity only because of the way in which the thought of such series of perceptions works upon the mind. ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, . . . there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different: Whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitutes the mind.

Leibniz held, in opposition to Descartes, that adult humans can have experiences of which they are unaware: Experiences of which effect what they do, but which are not brought to self-consciousness. Yet there are creatures, such as animals and infants, which completely lack the ability to reflect of their experiences, and to become aware of them as experiences of theirs. The unity of a subject’s experience, which stems from his capacity to recognize all his experience as his, was dubbed by Kant ‘ as the transcendental unity of an apperception ~ Leibniz’s term for inner awareness or self-consciousness. But, in contrast with ‘perception’ or ‘outer awareness’ ~ though, this apprehension of unity is transcendental, than empirical, it is presupposed in experience and cannot be derived from it. Kant used the need for this unity as the basis of his attemptive scepticism about the external world. He argued that my experiences could only be united in one-self-consciousness, if, at least some of them were experiences of a law-governed world of objects in space. Outer experience is thus a necessary condition of inner awareness.

Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kripke. For any judgement whose content involves a given concept, there is a ‘correctness condition’ for that judgement, a condition which is dependent in part on or upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into the territory of a thinker’s reasons for making judgements. A thinker’s visual perception can give him good reason for judging. ‘For a concept, and consideration how the referent of the concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent of the concept is that object, or property, or function . . . which makes the practices of judgement and inference in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessarily good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permits us to say what it is about a thinker’s previous judgements that make it the case that he is employing one concept than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would also allow us to say how the correctness condition is determined for a judgement in which the concept is applied to newly encountered objects. The judgement is correct if the new object had the property which in fact makes the judgement practices in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.

What is more that innate ideas have been variously defined by philosophers either as ideas consciously present to the mind prior to sense experience (the-dispositional sense), or as ideas which we have an innate disposition to form (though we need not be actually aware of them at any particular time, e.g., as babies)-the dispositional sense?

Understood in either way they were invoked to account for our recognition of certain truths without recourse to experiential truths without recourse verification, such as those of mathematics, or justify certain moral and religious claims which were held to be capable of being known by introspection of our innate ideas. Examples of such supposed truths might include ‘murder is wrong’ or ‘God exists’.

One difficulty with the doctrine is that it is sometimes formulated as one about concepts or ideas which are held to be innate and at other times as one about a source of propositional knowledge. In so far as concepts are taken to be innate, the doctrine relates primarily ti claim about meaning: Our idea of God, for example, is taken as a source for the meaning of the word God. When innate ideas are understood propositionally, their supposed innateness is taken as evidence for their truth. However, this clearly rests the assumption that innate prepositions have an unimpeachable source, usually taken to be God, but then any appeal to innate ideas to justify the existence of God is circular. Despite such difficulties the doctrine of innate ideas had a long and influential history until the eighteenth century and the concept has in recent decades been revitalized through its employment in Noam Chomsky’s influential account of the mind’s linguistic capabilities.

The attraction of the theory has been felt strongly by those philosophers who have been unable to give an alternative account of our capacity to recognize that some proposition cannot be justified solely on the basis of an appeal to sense experience. Thus Plato argued that, for example, recognition of mathematical truths could only be explained on the assumption of some form of recollection. Since there was no plausible post-natal source the recollection must refer back to a pre-natal acquisition of knowledge. Thus understood, the doctrine of innate ideas supposed the view that there were important truths innate in human beings and it was the senses which hindered their proper apprehension.

The ascetic implications of the doctrine were important in Christian philosophy throughout the Middle Ages and the doctrine featured powerfully in scholastic teaching until its displacement by Locke’s philosophy in the eighteenth century. It had in the meantime acquired modern expression in the philosophy of Descartes who argued that we can come to know certain important truths before we have any empirical knowledge at all. Our idea of God, for example, and our coming to recognize that God must necessarily exist, are, Descartes held, logically independent of sense experience. In England the Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More and Ralph Cudworth added considerable support.

Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and his alternative empiricist account was powerful enough to displace the doctrine from philosophy y almost totally. Leibniz, in his critique of Locke, attempted to defend it with a sophisticated dispositional version of the theory, but it attracted few followers.

The empiricist alternative to innate ideas as an explanation of the certainty of propositions was in the direction of construing all necessary truths as analytic. Kant’s refinement of the classification of propositions with the fourfold distinction, analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori did nothing to encourage a return to the innate idea’s doctrine, which slipped from view. The doctrine may fruitfully be understood as the production of confusion between explaining the genesis of ideas or concepts and the basis for regarding some propositions as necessarily true.

Nevertheless, according to Kant, our knowledge arises from two fundamentally different faculties of the mind, sensibility and understanding. He criticized his predecessors for running these faculties together. Leibniz for treating sensing as a confused mode of understanding and Locke for treating understanding as an abstracted mode of sensing. Kant held that each of the faculties operates with its own distinctive type of mental representation. Concepts, the instruments of the understanding, are mental representations that apply potentially to many things in virtue of their possession of a common feature. Intuitions, the instrument of sensibility, are representation that refer to just one thing and to that thing is played in Russell’s philosophy by ‘acquaintance’ though intuition’s objects are given to us, Kant said; Through concepts they are thought.

‘Thoughts without content are empty’, he says in an often quoted remark, and ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’. Exactly what Kant means by the remark is a debated question, however, answered in different ways by scholars who bring different elements of Kant’s text to bear on it. A minimal reading is that it is only propositionally structured knowledge that requires the collaboration of intuition and concept: This view allows that intuitions without concepts constitute some kind of non-judgmental awareness. A stronger reading is that it is reference or intentionality that depends on intuition and concept together, so that the blindness of intuition without concept is its referring to an object. A more radical view, yet is that intuitions without concepts are indeterminate, a mere blur, perhaps nothing at all. This last interpretation, though admittedly suggested by some things Kant says, is at odds with his official view about the separation of the faculties.

Least that ‘content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation had that makes it semantically evaluable. Wherefore, a statement is sometimes said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content, whereby its term is sometimes said to have a concept as it s content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have: A representation’s content is just whatever it is underwrite is its semantic evaluation.

According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such is the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entails psychological certainty, or acceptance. Nonetheless, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These argument s are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief, or a facsimile, are mutually incompatible, that the incompatibility thesis, or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so ha t each may exist without the other, however, the two may also coexist of the separability thesis.

The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible (Republic). Nonetheless this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.

A.Duncan-Jones cites linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people oftentimes say ‘I don’t believe she is guilty. I know she is’, where ‘just’ makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: ‘You didn’t hurt him, you killed him’.

H.A.Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis which hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty, as both infallibility and psychological certitude gives the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that knowledge never does, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, Prichard gives us no-good reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, only to suggest that we are completely confident is bizarre.

A.D.Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley’s version which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief, whereas knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although knowledge might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is ‘what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions’. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, ‘I am unsure whether my answer is true, still, I know it s correct’. Nonetheless, this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim, such as a claim to know something, and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While ‘I know such and such’ might be true even if I am sure of whether such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.

Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Radford’s view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example that Walter has forgotten that he learned some English history years prior and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur’? Since he forgot that he took history, he considers his correct responses to be no more than guesses. Nonetheless, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A fortiori he would deny being sure, or having the right to be sure, that, nonetheless that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would nonetheless insist that Walter knows when the Battle occurred, since clearly he remembered the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Walter to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, least of mention, that Woozley attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least, believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is ‘intentionally misleading’.

Those who agree with Radford’s defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Walter lack’s belief about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture since Walter does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when he seeks them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting the Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviorist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bain’s (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and hasn’t Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Walter gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviorist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.

D.M.Armstrong (1973) takes a different tack against Radford, Walter does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that points, however, Armstrong suggests that Walter believes that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. What is more that Armstrong insists, Walter also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066? After-all, had Walter been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and had he forgotten being ‘taught’ this and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 1066, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Walter’s false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted as a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radford’s original case as one in which Walter’s true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Wherefore, Jan consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to claim that knowledge entails belief.

The externalism/internalism distinction has been mainly applied if it requires that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalist and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any explicit explication. Also, it has been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and in a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought content.

Perhaps the clearest example of an internalist position would be a foundationalist view according to which foundational beliefs pertain to immediately experienced states of mind and other beliefs are justified by standing in cognitively accessible logical or inferential relations to such foundational beliefs. Similarly, a coherentist view could also be internalist, if both he beliefs or other states with which a justificadum belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible.

Also, on this way of drawing the distinction, a hybrid view to which some of the factors required for justification must be cognitively accessible while others need not and in general will not be, would count as an externalist position. Obviously too, a view that was externalist in relation to forms or versions of internalist, that by not requiring that the believer actually be aware of all justifying factors could still be internalist in relation for which requiring that he at least be capable of becoming aware of them.

The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of Reliabilism, whose main requirement for justification is roughly that the beliefs are produced in a way or via a process that makes it objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless be epistemically justified in accepting it. Thus such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, rather than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply charged the subject.

As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy of language more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, and so forth. That motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief or thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatory criteria employed by the experts in his social group, and so forth. , -not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.

An objection to externalist accounts of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors pertaining to the environment, the n knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors-which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.

The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist account of justification: That, if part or all of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to the content and the status of that content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible: Thus contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else: But such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.

If the world is radically different from the way it appears, to the pointy that apparent epistemic vices are actually truth-conducive, presumably his should not make us retrospectively term such vices ‘virtues’ even if they are and have always been truth-conducive. Suggestively, it would simply make the epistemic virtue qualities which a truth-desiring person would want to have. For even if, unbeknown to us, some wild sceptical possibility is realized, this would not affect our desires (it being, again, unknown). Such a characterization, moreover, it would seem to fit the virtues in our catalogue. Almost by definition, the truth-desiring person would want to be epistemically conscientious. And, given what seem to be the conditions pertaining to human life and knowledge, the truth-desiring person will also want to have the previously cited virtues of impartiality and intellectual courage.

Are, though, truth and the avoidance of error rich enough desires for the epistemically virtuous? Arguably not. For one thing, the virtuous inquirer aims not so much at having true beliefs as at discovering truths-a very different notion. Perpetual reading of a good encyclopaedia will expand my bank of true beliefs without markedly increasing human-kinds basic stock of truths. For Aristotle, too, one notes that true belief is not, as such, even a concern: The concern, is the discovery of scientific or philosophical truth. But, of course, the mere expansion of our bank of truths-even of scientific and philosophical truths-is not itself the complete goal of its present. Rather one looks for new truths of an appropriate kind-rich, deep, explanatorily fertile, say. By this reckoning, then, the epistemically virtuous person seeks at least three related, but separate ends, to discover new truths, to increase one’s explanatory understanding, to have true than false beliefs.

Another important area of concern for epistemologists is the relation between epistemic virtue and epistemic justification. Obviously, an epistemically virtuous person must itself, I take it, be virtuous. But is a virtuously formed belief automatically a justified one? I would hold that if a belief is virtuously formed, this fully justifies that person in having it: However, the belief itself may lack adequate justification, as the evidence for it may be, through no fault of this person, still inadequate. Different philosophers on this point or points, ae, however, apparently to have different intuitions.

Hegel’s theory of justification contains both ‘externalist’ and ‘coherentist’ elements. He recognizes that some justification is provided by percepts and beliefs being generated reliably by our interaction with the environment. Hegel contends that full justification additionally requires a self-conscious, reflective comprehension of one’s beliefs and experiences which integrates them into a systematic conceptual scheme which provides an account for them which is both coherent and reflexively self-consistent.

Hegel contends that the corrigibly of conceptual categories is a social phenomenon. Our partial ignorance about the world can be revealed and corrected because one and the same claim or principle can be applied, asserted and assessed by different people in the same context or by the same person in different contexts. Hegal’s theory of justification requires that an account be shown to e adequate to its domain and to be superior to its alternatives. In this regard, Hegal is a fallibilist according to whom justification is provisional and ineluctably historical, since it occurs against the background of less adequate alternative views.

Meanwhile, one important difference between the sceptical approach and to a greater extent traditional ones becomes plain when the two are applied to sceptical questions. On the classical view, if we are to explain how knowledge is possible, it is illegitimate to make use of the resources of science, this would simply beg the question against the sceptic by making use of the very knowledge which he calls into question. Thus, Descartes’ attempt to answer the sceptic begins by rejecting all those beliefs about which any doubt is possible. Descartes must respond to the sceptic from a starting place which includes no beliefs at all. Naturalistic epistemologists, however, understand the demand to explain the possibility of knowledge differently. As Quine argues, sceptical questions arise from within science. It is precisely our success in understanding the world, and thus, in seeing that appearance nd reality may differ, that raises the sceptical question in the first place. We may thus legitimately use the resources of science to answer the question which science itself has raised. The question about how knowledge is possible should it be construed as an empirical question: It is a question about how creatures such as we (given what our best current scientific theories tell us we are like) may come to have our best current scientific theories tell us the world is like. Quine suggests that the Darwinian account of the origin of species gives a very general explanation of why it is that we should be well adapted to getting true beliefs about our environment, while an examination of human psychology will fill the details of such an account. Although Quine himself does not suggest it, and so, investigations in the sociology of knowledge are obviously relevant as well.

This approach to sceptical questions clearly makes them quite tractable, and its proponents see this, understandably, as an important advantage of the naturalistic approach. It is in part for this reason that current work in psychology and sociology is under such close scrutiny by many epistemologists. By the same token, the detractors of the naturalistic approach argue that this way of dealing with sceptical questions simply bypasses the very questions which philosophers have long dealt with. Far from answering the traditional sceptical question it is argued, the naturalistic approach merely changes the topic. Debates between naturalistic epistemologists and their critics, in that frequently focus on whether this new way of doing epistemology adequately answers, transforms or simply ignores the questions which others see as central to epistemological inquiry. Some see the naturalistic approach as an attempt to abandon the philosophical study of knowledge entirely.

In thinking about the possibilities that we bear on in mind, our conscious states, according to Franz Brentano (1838-1917), are all objects of ‘inner perception’. Every such state is such that, the person who is in that state, it is evident to that person that he or she is in that state, least of mention, that each of our conscious states is not an object of an act of perception, wherefore the doctrine does not lead to an infinite regress.

Brentano holds that there are two types of conscious state-those that are ‘physical’ and those are ‘intentional’ a ‘physical’, or sensory, state is a sensation or sense-impression-a qualitative individual composed of parts that are spatially related to each other. ‘Intentional’ states, e.g., believing, considering, hoping, desiring which are characterized by the facts that (1) they are ‘directed upon objects’. (2) objects may be ‘directed upon, e.g., we may fear things that do not exist, and (3) such states are not sensory. There is no sensation, no sensory individual, that can be identified with any particular intentional attitude.

Following Leibniz, Brentano distinguishes two types of certainty: The certainty we can have with respect to the existence of our conscious states, and that a priori certainty that may be directed upon necessary truths. These two types of certainty may be combined in a significant way. At a given moment, I may be certain, on the basis of inner perception, that there is believing, desiring, hoping and fearing, and L may also be certain a priori that there cannot be believing, desiring, hoping, and fearing unless there is a ‘substance’ that believes, desires, hopes and fears. In such a case, it will be certain for me [as I will perceive] that there is a substance that believes, desires, hopes and fears. It is also axiomatic. Brentano says, that, if one is certain that a substance of a certain sort exists, then one is identical with that substance.

Brentano makes use of only two purely epistemic concepts, that of ‘being’ certain, or ‘evident’, and that of ‘being probable’. If a given hypothesis is probable, in the epistemic sense, for a particular person, then that person can be certain that the hypothesis is probable for him. Making use of the principles of probability, one may calculate the probability that a given hypothesis has on one’s evidence base.

Nonetheless, if our evidence-base is composed only of necessary truths and the facts of inner perception, then it is difficult to see how it could provide justification for any contingent truths other than those that pertain to states of consciousness. How could such an evidence-base even lend ‘probability’ to the hypothesis that there is a world of external physical things?

The awareness generated by an introspective act can have varying degrees of complexity. It might be a simple knowledge of (mental) things’ ~ such as a particular perception-episode, or it might be the more complex knowledge of truths about one’s own mind. In this latter full-blown judgement form, introspection is usually the self-ascription of psychological properties and, when linguistically expressed, results in statements like ‘I am watching the spider’ or ‘I am repulsed’.

In psychology this deliberate inward look becomes a scientific method when it is ‘directed toward answering questions of theoretical importance for the advancement of our systematic knowledge of the laws and conditions of mental processes’. In philosophy, introspection (sometimes also called ‘reflection’) remains simply that notice which mind takes of its own operations and has been used to serve the following important functions:

(1) Methodological: However, the fact that though experiments are a powerful addition in philosophical investigation. The Ontological Argument, for example, asks us to try to think of the most perfect being as lacking existence and Berkeley’s Master Argument challenges us to conceive of an unseen tree, conceptual results are then drawn from our failure or success. From such experiments to work, we must not only have (or fail to have) the relevant conceptions but also know that we have (or fail to have) them ~ presumably by introspection.

(2) Metaphysical: A philosophy of mind needs to take cognizance of introspection. One can argue for ‘ghostly’ mental entities for ‘qualia’, for ‘sense-data’ by claiming introspective awareness of them. First-person psychological reports can have special consequences for the nature of persons and personal identity: Hume, for example, was content to reject the notion of a soul-substance because he failed to find such a thing by ‘looking within’. Moreover, some philosophers argue for the existence of additional perspectival facts ~ the fact of ‘what it is like’ to be the person I am or to have an experience of such-and-such-a-kind. Introspection as our access to such facts becomes important when we collectively consider the managing forms of a complete substantiation of the world.

(3) Epistemological: Surprisingly, the most important use made of introspection has been in an accounting for our knowledge of the outside world. According to a foundationalist theory of justification an empirical belief is either basic and ‘self-justifying’ or justified in relation to basic beliefs. Basic beliefs therefore, constitute the rock-bottom of all justification and knowledge. Now introspective awareness is said to have a unique epistemological status in it, we are said to achieve the best possibly epistemological position and consequently, introspective beliefs and thereby constitute the foundation of all justification.

Coherence is a major player in the theatre of knowledge. There are coherence theories of belief, truth and justification where these combine in various ways to yield theories of knowledge, coherence theories of belief are concerned with the content of beliefs. Consider a belief you now have, the belief that you are reading a page in a book. So what makes that belief the belief that it is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book than the belief that you have something other that is elsewhere of a preoccupation? The same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has is the role it plays within a network of relations to other beliefs, the role in inference and implication, for example, I infer different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from different things than I refer other belief’s form.

The input of perception and the output of an action supplement the central role of the systematic relations the belief has to other beliefs, except that the systematic relations given to the belief specified of the content it has. They are the fundamental source of the content of beliefs. That is how coherence comes to be. A belief that the content that it does because of the away in which it coheres within the system of beliefs, however, weak coherence theories affirm that coherence is one determinant of the content of belief as strong coherence theories on the content of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the content of belief.

Nonetheless, the concept of the given-referential immediacy as apprehended of the contents of sense experience is expressed in the first person, and present tense reports of appearances. Apprehension of the given is seen as immediate both in a causal sense, since it lacks the usual causal chain involved in perceiving real qualities of physical objects, and in an epistemic sense, since judgements expressing it are justified independently of all other beliefs and evidence. Some proponents of the idea of the ‘given’ maintain that its apprehension is absolutely certain: Infallible, incorrigible and indubitable. It has been claimed also that a subject is omniscient with regard to the given ~ if a property appears, then the subject knows this.

Without some independent indication that some of the beliefs within a coherent system are true, coherence in itself is no indication of truth. Fairy stories can cohere, however, our criteria for justification must indicate to us the probable truth of our beliefs. Hence, within any system of beliefs there must be some privileged class with which others must cohere to be justified. In the case of empirical knowledge, such privileged beliefs must represent the point of contact between subject and world: They must originate within our descendable inherent perceptions of the world, that when challenged, however, we justify our ordinary perceptual beliefs about physical properties by appeal to beliefs about appearances. The latter seem more suitable as foundational, since there is no class of more certain perceptual beliefs to which we appeal for their justification.

The argument that foundations must be certain was offered by Lewis (1946). He held that no proposition can be probable unless some are certain. If the probability of all propositions or beliefs were relative to evidence expressed in others, and if these relations were linear, then any regress would apparently have to terminate in propositions or beliefs that are certain. But Lewis shows neither that such relations must be linear nor that redresses cannot terminate in beliefs that are merely probable or justified in themselves without being certain or infallible.

Arguments against the idea of the given originate with Kant (1724-1804), who argues that percepts without concepts do not yet constitute any form of knowing. Being non-epistemic, they presumably cannot serve as epistemic foundations. Once we recognize that we must apply concepts of properties to appearances and formulate beliefs utilizing those concepts before the appearances can play any epistemic role, it becomes more plausible that such beliefs are fallible. The argument was developed by Wilfrid Sellars (1963), which according to him, the idea of the given involves a confusion between sensing particulars (having sense impressions), which is non-epistemic, and having non-inferential knowledge of propositions referring to appearances. The former may be necessary for acquiring perceptual knowledge, but it is not itself a primitive kind of knowing. Its being non-epistemic renders it immune from error, but also unsuitable for epistemological foundations. The latter, non-referential perceptual knowledge, are fallible, requiring concepts acquired through trained responses to public physical objects.

Contemporary foundationalists deny the coherentist’s claim whole eschewing the claim that foundations, in the form of reports about appearances, are infallible. They seek alternatives to the given as foundations. Although arguments against infallibility are sound, other objections to the idea of foundations are not. That concepts of objective properties are learned prior to concepts of appearances, for example, implied neither that claims about appearances are less certain than claims about objective properties, nor that the latter are prior in chains of justification. That there can be no knowledge prior to the acquisition and consistent application of concepts allows for propositions whose truth requires only consistent applications of concepts, and this may be so for some claims about appearances, least of mention, coherentists would add that such genuine belief’s stands in need of justification in themselves and so cannot be foundations.

Until very recently it could have been that most approaches to the philosophy of science were ‘cognitive’. This includes ‘logical positivism’, as nearly all of those who wrote about the nature of science would have been in agreement that science ought to be ‘value-free’. This had been a particular emphasis on the part of the first positivist, as it would be upon twentieth-century successors. Science, so it is said, deals with ‘facts’, and facts and values and irreducibly distinct. Facts are objective. They are what we seek in our knowledge of the world. Values are subjective: They bear the mark of human interest, they are the radically individual products of feeling and desire. Fact and value cannot, therefore, be inferred from fact, fact cannot be influenced by value. There were philosophers, notably some in the Kantian tradition, who viewed the relation of the human individual to the universalist aspiration of difference rather differently. But the legacy of three centuries of largely empiricist reflection of the ‘new’ sciences ushered in by Galilee Galileo (1564-1642), the Italian scientist whose distinction belongs to the history of physics and astronomy, rather than natural philosophy.

The philosophical importance of Galileo’s science rests largely upon the following closely related achievements: (1) His stunning successful arguments against Aristotelean science, (2) his proofs that mathematics is applicable to the real world. (3) His conceptually powerful use of experiments, both actual and employed regulatively, (4) His treatment of causality, replacing appeal to hypothesized natural ends with a quest for efficient causes, and (5) his unwavering confidence in the new style of theorizing that would come to be known as ‘mechanical explanation’.

A century later, the maxim that scientific knowledge is ‘value-laded’ seems almost as entrenched as its opposite was earlier. It is supposed that between fact and value has been breached, and philosophers of science seem quite at home with the thought that science and value may be closely intertwined after all. What has happened to bring about such an apparently radical change? What is its implications for the objectivity of science, the prized characteristic that, from Plato’s time onwards, has been assumed to set off real knowledge (epistēmē) from mere opinion (doxa)? To answer these questions adequately, one would first have to know something of the reasons behind the decline of logical positivism, as, well as of the diversity of the philosophies of science that have succeeded it.

More general, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science is burgeoning on several fronts. Contemporary philosophical re-election about the mind ~ which has been quite intensive ~ has been influenced by this empirical inquiry, to the extent that the boundary lines between them are blurred in places.

Nonetheless, the philosophy of mind at its core remains a branch of metaphysics, traditionally conceived. Philosophers continue to debate foundational issues in terms not radically differently from those in vogue in previous eras. Many issues in the metaphysics of science hinge on the notion of ‘causation’. This notion is as important in science as it is in everyday thinking, and much scientific theorizing is concerned specifically to identify the ‘causes’ of various phenomena. However, there is little philosophical agreement on what it is to say that one event is the cause of some other.

Modern discussion of causation starts with the Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist David Hume (1711-76), who argued that causation is simply a matter for which he denies that we have innate ideas, that the causal relation is observably anything other than ‘constant conjunction’, that there are observable necessary connections anywhere, and that there is either an empirical or demonstrative proof for the assumptions that the future will resemble the past, and that every event has a cause. That is to say, that there is an irresolvable dispute between advocates of free-will and determinism, that extreme scepticism is coherent and that we can find the experiential source of our ideas of self-substance or God.

According to Hume (1978) on event causes another if only if events of the type to which the first event belongs regularly occur in conjunctive events of the type to which the second event belongs. The formulation, however, leaves a number of questions open. Firstly, there is a problem of distinguishing genuine ‘causal law’ from ‘accidental regularities’. Not all regularities are sufficiently law-like to underpin causal relationships. Being that there is a screw in my desk could well be constantly conjoined with being made of copper, without its being true that these screws are made of copper because they are in my desk. Secondly, the idea of constant conjunction does not give a ‘direction’ to causation. Causes need to be distinguished from effects. But knowing that A-type events are constantly conjoined with B-type events does not tell us which of ‘A’ and ‘B’ is the cause and which the effect, since constant conjunction is itself a symmetric relation. Thirdly, there is a problem about ‘probabilistic causation’. When we say that causes and effects are constantly conjoined, do we mean that the effects are always found with the causes, or is it enough that the causes make the effect probable?

Many philosophers of science during the past century have preferred to talk about ‘explanation’ than causation. According to the covering-law model of explanation, something is explained if it can be deduced from premises which include one or more laws. As applied to the explanation of particular events this implies that one particular event can be explained if it is linked by a law to some other particular event. However, while they are often treated as separate theories, the covering-law account of explanation is at bottom little more than a variant of Hume’s constant conjunction account of causation. This affinity shows up in the fact at the covering-law account faces essentially the same difficulties as Hume: (1) In appealing to deduction from ‘laws’, it needs to explain the difference between genuine laws and accidentally true regularities: (2) Its omission by effects, as well as effects by causes, after all, it is as easy to deduce the height of the flag-pole from the length of its shadow and the law of optics: (3) Are the laws invoked in explanation required to be exceptionalness and deterministic, or is it an acceptable say, to appeal to the merely probabilistic fact that smoking makes cancer more likely, in explaining why some particular person develops cancer?

Nevertheless, one of the centrally obtainable achievements for which the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploitrated in the science. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explanations of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial concepts as fitness and biological function. By introducing ‘teleological considerations’, this account views beliefs as states with biological purpose and analyses their truth conditions specifically as those conditions that they are biologically supposed to covary with.

A teleological theory of representation needs to be supplemental with a philosophical account of biological representation, generally a selectionism account of biological purpose, according to which item ‘F’ has purpose ‘G’ if and only if it is now present as a result of past selection by some process which favoured items with ‘G’. So, a given belief type will have the purpose of covarying with ‘P’, say. If and only if some mechanism has selected it because it has covaried with ‘P’ the past.

Along the same lines, teleological theory holds that ‘r’ represents ‘x’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘x’, teleological theories take issue depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps the most important distinction is that between historical theories of functions and a-historical theories. Historical theories individuate functional states (hence, contents) in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘x’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘x’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical states being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘x’ according to historical theories.

The American philosopher of mind (1935-) Jerry Alan Fodor, is known for resolute ‘realism’ about the nature of mental functioning, taking the analogy between thought and computation seriously. Fodor believes that mental representations should be conceived as individual states with their own identities and structures, like formulae transformed by processes of computation or thought. His views are frequently contrasted with those of ‘holist’ such as the American philosopher, Herbert Donald Davidson (1917-2003), or ‘instrumentalists’ about mental ascription, such as the British philosopher of logic and language, Eardley Anthony Michael Dummett, 1925- In recent years he has become a vocal critic of some of the aspirations of cognitive science.

Nonetheless, a suggestion extrapolating the solution of teleology is continually queried by points as owing to ‘causation’ and ‘content’, and ultimately a fundamental appreciation is to be considered, is that: We suppose that there’s a causal path from A’s to ‘A’s’ and a causal path from B’s to ‘A’s’, and our problem is to find some difference between B-caused ‘A’s’ and A-caused ‘A’s’ in virtue of which the former but not the latter misrepresented. Perhaps, the two paths differ in their counter-factual properties. In particular, in spite of the fact that although A’s and B’s botheration gives cause by A’s’ every fragmentation is in pieces of its matter in the contestation of conveyance, and, as, perhaps, a conceivable assumption deducing that of only A’s would cause ‘A’s’ in ~ as one can say -, ‘optimal circumstances’. We could then hold that a symbol expresses its ‘optimal property’, viz., the property that would causally control its tokening in optimal circumstances. Correspondingly, when the tokening of a symbol is causally controlled by properties other than its optimal property, the tokens that eventuate are ipso facto wild.

Suppose at the present time, that this story about ‘optimal circumstances’ is proposed as part of a naturalized semantics for mental representations. In which case it is, of course, essential that it be possible to say that the optimal circumstances for tokening a mental representation are in terms that are not themselves either semantical or intentional. (It would not do, for example, to identify the optimal circumstances for tokening a symbol as those in which the tokens are true, that would be to assume precisely the sort of semantical notion that the theory is supposed to naturalize.) Befittingly, the suggestion ~ to put it in a nutshell ~ is that appeals to ‘optimality’ should be buttressed by appeals to ‘teleology’: Optimal circumstances are the ones in which the mechanisms that mediate symbol tokening are functioning ‘as they are supposed to’. In the case of mental representations, these would be paradigmatically circumstances where the mechanisms of belief fixation are functioning as them are supposed to.

So, then: The teleologies of the cognitive mechanisms determine the optimal condition for belief fixation, and the optimal condition for belief fixation determines the content of beliefs. So the story goes.

To put this objection in slightly other words: The teleology story perhaps strikes one as plausible in that it understands one normative notion ~ truth ~ in terms of another normative notion ~ optimality. But this appearance if it is spurious there is no guarantee that the kind of optimality that teleology reconstructs has much to do with the kind of optimality that the explication of ‘truth’ requires. When mechanisms of repression are working ‘optimally’ ~ when they’re working ‘as they’re supposed to’ ~ what they deliver are likely to be ‘falsehoods’.

Once, again, there’s no obvious reason why coitions that are optimal for the tokening of one sort of mental symbol need be optimal for the tokening of other sorts. Perhaps the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs about very large objects, are different from the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs about very small ones, are different from the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs sights. But this raises the possibility that if we’re to say which conditions are optimal for the fixation of a belief, we’ll have to know what the content of the belief is ~ what it’s a belief about. Our explication of content would then require a notion of optimality, whose explication in turn requires a notion of content, and the resulting pile would clearly be unstable.

Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘x’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘x’. Teleological theories differ, depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps the most important distinction is that between historical theories of functions: Historically, theories individuate functional states (hence, contents) in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘x’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘x’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical states being a-historical), but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘x’ according to historical theories.

Just as functional role theories hold that r’s representing ‘x’ is grounded in the functional role ‘r’ has in the representing system, i.e., on the relations imposed by specified cognitive processes between ‘r’ and other representations in the system’s repertoire. Functional role theories take their cue from such common-sense ideas as that people cannot believe that cats are furry if they do not know that cats are animals or that fur is like hair.

That being said, that nowhere is the new period of collaboration between philosophy and other disciplines more evident than in the new subject of cognitive science. Cognitive science from its very beginning has been ‘interdisciplinary’ in character, and is in effect the joint property of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science and anthropology. There is, therefore, a great variety of different research projects within cognitive science, but the central area of cognitive science, its hard-coded ideology rests on the assumption that the mind is best viewed as analogous to a digital computer. The basic idea behind cognitive science is that recent developments in computer science and artificial intelligence have enormous importance for our conception of human beings. The basic inspiration for cognitive science went something like this: Human beings do information processing. Computers are designed precisely do information processing. Therefore, one way to study human cognition ~ perhaps the best way to study it ~ is to study it as a matter of computational information processing. Some cognitive scientists think that the computer is just a metaphor for the human mind: Others think that the mind is literally a computer program. But it is fair to say, that without the computational model there would not have been a cognitive science as we now understand it.

In, Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the first modern systematic presentation of empiricist epistemology, and as such had important implications for the natural sciences and for philosophy of science generally. Like his predecessor, Descartes, the English philosopher (1632-1704) Walter Locke began his account of knowledge from the conscious mind aware of ideas. Unlike Descartes, however, he was concerned not to build a system based on certainty, but to identify the mind’s scope and limits. The premise upon which Locke built his account, including his account of the natural sciences, is that the ideas which furnish the mind are all derived from experience. He thus, totally rejected any kind of innate knowledge. In this he consciously opposing Descartes, who had argued that it is possible to come to knowledge of fundamental truths about the natural world through reason alone. Descartes (1596-1650) had argued, that we can come to know the essential nature of both the ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ by pure reason. Walter Locke accepted Descartes’s criterion of clear and distinct ideas as the basis for knowledge, but denied any source for them other than experience. It was information that came in a via the five senses (ideas of sensation) and ideas engendered from pure inner experiences (ideas of reflection) arose in the building blocks of the understanding.

Locke combined his commitment to ‘the new way of ideas’ with the native espousal of the ‘corpuscular philosophy’ of the Irish scientist (1627-92) Robert Boyle. This, in essence, was an acceptance of a revised, more sophisticated account of matter and its properties that had been advocated by the ancient atomists and recently supported by Galileo (1564-1642) and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). Boyle argued from theory and experiment that there were powerful reasons to justify some kind of corpuscular account of matter and its properties. He called the latter qualities, which he distinguished as primary and secondary. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities may be reached by two rather different routes: Either from the nature or essence of matter or from the nature and essence of experience, though practising these have tended to run together. The former considerations make the distinction seem like an a priori, or necessary, truth about the nature of matter, while the latter make it appears to be an empirical hypothesis -. Locke, too, accepted this account, arguing that the ideas we have of the primary qualities of bodies resemble those qualities as they are in the subject, whereas the ideas of the secondary qualities, such as colour, taste, and smell, do not resemble their causes in the object.

There is no strong connection between acceptance of the primary secondary quality distinction and Locke’s empiricism and Descartes had also argued strongly for universal acceptance by natural philosophers, and Locke embraced it within his more comprehensive empirical philosophy. But Locke’ empiricism did have major implications for the natural sciences, as he well realized. His account begins with an analysis of experience. All ideas, he argues, are either simple or complex. Simple ideas are those like the red of a particular rose or the roundness of a snowball. Complicated and complex ideas, our ideas of the rose or the snowball, are combinations of simple ideas. We may create new complicated and complex ideas in our imagination ~ a parallelogram, for example. But simple ideas can never be created by us: We just have them or not, and characteristically they are caused, for example, the impact on our senses of rays of light or vibrations of sound in the air coming from a particular physical object. Since we cannot create simple ideas, and they are determined by our experience. Our knowledge is in a very strict uncompromising way limited. Besides, our experiences are always of the particular, never of the general. It is this particular simple idea or that particular complex idea that we apprehend. We never in that sense apprehend a universal truth about the natural world, but only particular instances. It follows from this that all claims to generality about that world ~ for example, all claims to identity what were then beginning to be called the laws of nature ~ must to that extent go beyond our experience and thus be less than certain.

The Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist, (1711-76) David Hume, whose famous discussion appears in both his major philosophical works, the ‘Treatise’ (1739) and the ‘Enquiry’(1777). The distinction is couched in terms of the concept of causality, so that where we are accustomed to talking of laws, Hume contends, involves three ideas:

1. That there should be a regular concomitance between

events of the type of the cause and those of the type

of the effect.

2. That the cause event should be contiguous with the

affect events.

3. That the cause event should necessitate the effect event.

The tenets (1) and (2) occasion no differently for Hume, since he believes that there are patterns of sensory impressions un-problematically related to the idea of regularity concomitance and of contiguity. But the third requirement is deeply problematic, in that the idea of necessarily that figures in it seems to have no sensory impression correlated with it. However, carefully and attentively we scrutinize a causal process, we do not seem to observe anything that might be the observed correlate of the idea of necessity. We do not observe any kind of activity, power, or necessitation. All we ever observe is one event following another, which is logically independent of it. Nor is this logical necessity, since, as, Hume observes, one can jointly assert the existence of the cause and a denial of the existence of the effect, as specified in the causal statement or the law of nature, without contradiction. What, then, are we to make of the seemingly central notion of necessity that is deeply embedded in the very idea of causation, or lawfulness? To this query, Hume gives an ingenious and telling story. There is an impression corresponding to the idea of causal necessity, but it is a psychological phenomenon: Our exception that even similar to those we have already observed to be correlated with the cause-type of events will come to be in this case too. Where does that impression come from? It is created as a kind of mental habit by the repeated experience of regular concomitance between events of the type of the effect and the occurring of events of the type of the cause. And then, the impression that corresponds to the idea of regular concomitance ~ the law of nature then asserts nothing but the existence of the regular concomitance.

At this point in our narrative, the question at once arises as to whether this factor of life in nature, thus interpreted, corresponds to anything that we observe in nature. All philosophy is an endeavour to obtain a self-consistent understanding of things observed. Thus, its development is guided in two ways, one is demand for coherent self-consistency, and the other is the elucidation of things observed. With our direct observations how are we to conduct such comparisons? Should we turn to science? No. There is no way in which the scientific endeavour can detect the aliveness of things: Its methodology rules out the possibility of such a finding. On this point, the English mathematician and philosopher (1861-1947) Alfred Whitehead, comments: That science can find no individual enjoyment in nature, as science can find no creativity in nature, it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of natural science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of physical science lies in the fact that such science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat ~ or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental.

Whitehead claims that the methodology of science makes it blind to a fundamental aspect of reality, namely, the primacy of experience, it neglected half of the evidence. Working within Descartes’ dualistic framework reference, of matter and mind as separate and incommensurate, science limits itself to the study of objectivised phenomena, neglecting the subject and the mental events that are his or her experience.

Both the adoption of the Cartesian paradigm and the neglect of mental events are reason enough to suspect ‘blindness’, but there is no need to rely on suspicions. This blindness is clearly evident. Scientific discoveries, impressive as they are, are fundamentally superficial. Science can express regularities observed in nature, but it cannot explain the reasons for their occurrence. Consider, for example, Newton’s law of gravity. It shows that such apparently disparate phenomena as the falling of an apple and the revolution of the earth around the sun are aspects of the same regularity ~ gravity. According to this law the gravitational attraction between two objects deceases in proportion to the square of the distance between them. Why is that so? Newton could not provide an answer. Simpler still, why does celestial or supernal space have three dimensions? Why is time one-dimensional? Whitehead notes, ‘None of these laws of nature gives the slightest evidence of necessity. They are [merely] the modes of procedure which within the scale of observation do in fact prevail’.

This analysis reveals that the capacity of science to fathom the depths of reality is limited. For example, if reality is, in fact, made up of discrete units, and these units have the fundamental character in being ‘ the pulsing throbs of experience’, then science may be in a position to discover the discreteness: But it has no access to the subjective side of nature since, as the Austrian physicist(1887-1961) Erin Schrödinger points out, we ‘exclude the subject of cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand’. It follows that in order to find ‘the elucidation of things observed’ in relation to the experiential or aliveness aspect, we cannot rely on science, we need to look elsewhere.

If, instead of relying on science, we rely on our immediate observation of nature and of ourselves, we find, first, that this [i.e., Descartes’] stark division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation. We find ourselves living within nature. Secondly, in that we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature, and thirdly, that we should reject the notion of idle wheels in the process of nature. Every factor which makes a difference, and that difference can only be expressed in terms of the individual character of that factor.

Whitehead proceeds to analyse our experiences in general, and our observations of nature in particular, and ends up with ‘mutual immanence’ as a central theme. This mutual immanence is obvious in the case of an experience that, I am a part of the universe, and, since I experience the universe, the experienced universe is part of me. Whitehead gives an example, ‘I am in the room, and the room is an item in my present experience. But my present experience is what I am now’. A generalization of this relationship to the case of any actual occasions yields the conclusion that ‘the world is included within the occasion in one sense, and the occasion is included in the world in another sense’. The idea that each actual occasion appropriates its universe follows naturally from such considerations.

The description of an actual entity for being a distinct unit is, therefore, only one part of the story. The other, complementary part is this: The very nature of each and every actual entity is one of interdependence with all the other actual entities in the universe. Each and every effective entity the determinant by which some outward appearance of something as distinguished from the substance for which it is made a process of prehending or appropriating all the other actual entities and creating one new entity out of them all, namely, itself.

There are two general strategies for distinguishing laws from accidentally true generalizations. The first stands by Hume’s idea that causal connections are mere constant conjunctions, and then seeks to explain why some constant conjunctions are better than others. That is, this first strategy accepts the principle that causation involves nothing more than certain events always happening together with certain others, and then seeks to explain why some such patterns ~ the ‘laws’ ~ matter more than others ~ the ‘accidents’ -. The second strategy, by contrast, rejects the Humean presupposition that causation involves nothing more than is responsible for an effect to happen in reserve to the chance-stantial co-occurrence, and instead postulates the relationship ‘necessitation’, a kind of ‘cement, which links events that are connected by law, but not those events (like having a screw in my desk and being made of copper) that are only accidentally conjoined.

There are a number of versions of the first Human strategy. The most successful, originally proposed by the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher F.P. Ramsey (1903-30), and later revived by the American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), who holds that laws are those true generalizations that can be fitted into an ideal system of knowledge. The thought is, that, the laws are those patterns that are somewhat explicated in terms of basic science, either as fundamental principles themselves, or as consequences of those principles, while accidents, although true, have no such explanation. Thus, ‘All water at standard pressure boils at 1000 C’ is a consequence of the laws governing molecular bonding: But the fact that ‘All the screws in my desk are copper’ is not part of the deductive structure of any satisfactory science. Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-30), neatly encapsulated this idea by saying that laws are ‘consequences of those propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system’.

Advocates of the alternative non-Humean strategy object that the difference between laws and accidents is not a ‘linguistic’ matter of deductive systematization, but rather a ‘metaphysical’ contrast between the kind of links they report. They argue that there is a link in nature between being at 1000 C and boiling, but not between being ‘in my desk’ and being ‘made of copper’, and that this is nothing to do with how the description of this link may fit into theories. According to the forthright Australian D.M. Armstrong (1983), the most prominent defender of this view, the real difference between laws and accidentals, is simply that laws report relationships of natural ‘necessitation’, while accidents only report that two types of events happen to occur together.

Armstrong’s view may seem intuitively plausible, but it is arguable that the notion of necessitation simply restates the problem, than solving it. Armstrong says that necessitation involves something more than constant conjunction: If two events e related by necessitation, then it follows that they are constantly conjoined, but two events can be constantly conjoined without being related by necessitation, as when the constant conjunction is just a matter of accidents. So necessitation is a stronger relationship than constant conjunction. However, Armstrong and other defenders of this view say very little about what this extra strength amounts to, except that it distinguishes laws from accidents. Armstrong’s critics argue that a satisfactory account of laws ought to cast more light than this on the nature of laws.

Hume said that the earlier of two causally related events is always the cause, and the later effect. However, there are a number of objections to using the earlier-later ‘arow of time’ to analyse the directional ‘arrow of causation’. For a start, it seems in principle, possible that some causes and effects could be simultaneous. That more, in the idea that time is directed from ‘earlier’ too ‘later’ itself stands in need of philosophical explanation ~ and one of the most popular explanations is that the idea of ‘movement’ from earlier to later depend on the fact that cause-effect pairs always have a time, and explain ‘earlier’ as the direction in which causes lie, and ‘later’ as the direction of effects, that we will clearly need to find some account of the direction of causation which does not itself assume the direction of time.

A number of such accounts have been proposed. David Lewis (1979) has argued that the asymmetry of causation derives from an ‘asymmetry of over-determination’. The over-determination of present events by past events ~ consider a person who dies after simultaneously being shot and struck by lightning ~ is a very rare occurrence, by contrast, the multiple ‘over-determination’ of present events by future events is absolutely normal. This is because the future, unlike the past, will always contain multiple traces of any present event. To use Lewis’s example, when the president presses the red button in the White House, the future effects do not only include the dispatch of nuclear missiles, but also the fingerprint on the button, his trembling, the further depletion of his gin bottle, the recording of the button’s click on tape, he emission of light waves bearing the image of his action through the window, the warnings of the wave from the passage often signal current, and so on, and so on, and on.

The American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), relates this asymmetry of over-determination to the asymmetry of causation as follows. If we suppose the cause of a given effect to have been absent, then this implies the effect would have been absent too, since (apart from freak -like occurrence in the lightning-shooting case) there will not be any other causes left to ‘fix’ the effect. By contrast, if we suppose a given effect of some cause to have been absent, this does not imply the cause would have been absent, for there are still all the other traces left to ‘fix’ the causes. Lewis argues that these counterfactual considerations suffice to show why causes are different from effects.

Other philosophers appeal to a probabilistic variant of Lewis’s asymmetry. Following, the philosopher of science and probability theorists, Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), they note that the different causes of any given type of effect are normally probabilistically independent of each other, by contrast, the different effects of any given type of cause are normally probabilistically correlated. For example, both obesity and high excitement can cause heart attacks, but this does not imply that fat people are more likely to get excited than thin ones: Its facts, that both lung cancer and nicotine-stained fingers can result from smoking does imply that lung cancer is more likely among people with nicotine-stained fingers. So this account distinguishes effects from causes by the fact that the former, but not the latter are probabilistically dependent on each other.

However, there is another course of thought in philosophy of science, the tradition of ‘negative’ or ‘eliminative’ induction. From the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and in modern time the philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994), we have the idea of using logic to bring falsifying evidence to bear on hypotheses about what must universally be the case that many thinkers accept in essence his solution to the problem of demarcating proper science from its imitators, namely that the former results in genuinely falsifiable theories whereas the latter do not. Although falsely, allowed many people’s objections to such ideologies as psychoanalysis and Marxism.

Hume was interested in the processes by which we acquire knowledge: The processes of perceiving and thinking, of feeling and reasoning. He recognized that much of what we claim to know derives from other people secondhand, thirdhand or worse: Moreover, our perceptions and judgements can be distorted by many factors ~ by what we are studying, as well as by the very act of study itself, the main reason, however, behind his emphasis on ‘probabilities and those other measures of evidence on which life and action entirely depend’ is this: It is apparent, for by and large, that complete understanding concerning the validity of ‘matter of fact’, are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that we can never infer the existence of one object from another unless they are connected together, nor either mediately or immediately.

When we apparently observe a whole sequence, say of one ball hitting another, what exactly do we observe? And in the much commoner cases, when we wonder about the unobserved causes or effects of the events we observe, what precisely are we doing?

Hume recognized that a notion of ‘must’ or necessity is a peculiar feature of causal relation, inference and principles, and challenges us to explain and justify the notion. He argued that there is no observable feature of events, nothing like a physical bond, which can be properly labelled the ‘necessary connection’ between a given cause and its effect: Events simply are, they merely occur, and there is in ‘must’ or ‘ought’ about them. However, repeated experience of pairs of events sets up the habit of expectation in us, such that when one of the pair occurs we inescapably expect the other. This expectation makes us infer the unobserved cause or unobserved effect of the observed event, and we mistakenly project this mental inference onto the events themselves. There is no necessity observable in causal relations, all that can be observed is regular sequence, here is necessity in causal inferences, but only in the mind. Once we realize that causation is a relation between pairs of events. We also realize that often we are not present for the whole sequence e which we want to divide into ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Our understanding of the casual relation is thus intimately linked with the role of the causal inference cause only causal inferences entitle us to ‘go beyond what is immediately present to the senses’. But now two very important assumptions emerge behind the causal inference: The assumptions that like causes, in ‘like circumstances, will always produce like effects’, and the assumption that ‘the course of nature will continue uniformly the same’ ~ or, briefly that the future will resemble the past. Unfortunately, this last assumption lacks either empirical or a priori proof, that is, it can be conclusively established neither by experience nor by thought alone.

Hume frequently endorsed a standard seventeenth-century view that all our ideas are ultimately traceable, by analysis, to sensory impressions of an internal or external kind. Accordingly, he claimed that all his theses are based on ‘experience’, understood as sensory awareness together with memory, since only experience establishes matters of fact. But is our belief that the future will resemble the past properly construed as a belief concerning only a mater of fact? As the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) remarked, earlier this century, the real problem that Hume rises are whether future futures will resemble future pasts, in the way that past futures really did resemble past pasts. Hume declares that ‘if . . . the past may be no rule for the future, all experience become useless and can give rise to inference or conclusion. And yet, he held, the supposition cannot stem from innate ideas, since there are no innate ideas in his view nor can it stems from any abstract formal reasoning. For one thing, the future can surprise us, and no formal reasoning seems able to embrace such contingencies: For another, even animals and unthinkable people conduct their lives as if they assume the future resembles the past: Dogs return for buried bones, children avoid a painful fire, and so forth. Hume is not deploring the fact that we have to conduct our lives on the basis of probabilities, and he is not saying that inductive reasoning could or should be avoided or rejected. Rather, he accepted inductive reasoning but tried to show that whereas formal reasoning of the kind associated with mathematics cannot establish or prove matters of fact, factual or inductive reasoning lacks the ‘necessity’ and ‘certainty’ associated with mathematics. His position, therefore clear; because ‘every effect is a distinct event from its cause’, only investigation can settle whether any two particular events are causally related: Causal inferences cannot be drawn with the force of logical necessity familiar to us from deductivity, but, although they lack such force, they should not be discarded. In the context of causation, inductive inferences are inescapable and invaluable. What, then, makes ‘past experience’ the standard of our future judgement? The answer is ‘custom’, it is a brute psychological fact, without which even animal life of a simple kind would be more or less impossible. ‘We are determined by custom to suppose the future conformable to the past’ (Hume, 1978), nevertheless, whenever we need to calculate likely events we must supplement and correct such custom by self-conscious reasoning.

Nonetheless, the problem that the causal theory of reference will fail once it is recognized that all representations must occur under some aspect or that the extentionality of causal relations is inadequate to capture the aspectual character of reference. The only kind of causation that could be adequate to the task of reference is intentional causal or mental causation, but the causal theory of reference cannot concede that ultimately reference is achieved by some met device, since the whole approach behind the causal theory was to try to eliminate the traditional mentalism of theories of reference and meaning in favour of objective causal relations in the world, though it is at present by far the most influential theory of reference, will prove to be a failure for these reasons.

If mental states are identical with physical states, presumably the relevant physical states are various sorts of neural states. Our concepts of mental states such as thinking, sensing, and feeling are of course, different from our concepts of neural states, of whatever sort. But that is no problem for the identity theory. As J.J.C. Smart (1962), who first argued for the identity theory, emphasized, the requisite identities do not depend on understanding concepts of mental states or the meanings of mental terms. For ‘a’ to be the identical with ‘b’, ‘a’, and ‘b’ must have exactly the same properties, but the terms ‘a’ and ‘b’ need not mean the same. Its principal means by measure can be accorded within the indiscernibility of identicals, in that, if ‘A’ is identical with ‘B’, then every property that ‘A’ has ‘B’, and vice versa. This is, sometimes known as Leibniz’ s Law.

But a problem does seem to arise about the properties of mental states. Suppose pain is identical with a certain firing of c-fibres. Although a particular pain is the very same as a neural-firing, we identify that state in two different ways: As a pain and as neural-firing. that the state will therefore have certain properties in virtue of which we identify it as pain and others in virtue of which we identify it as an excitability of neural firings. The properties in virtue of which we identify it as a pain will be mental properties, whereas those in virtue of which ewe identify it as neural excitability firing, will be physical properties. This has seemed as of too many to lead to a kind of dualism at the level of the properties of mental states, even if we reject dualism of substances and take people simply to be physical organisms, those organisms still have both mental and physical states. Similarly, even if we identify those mental states with certain physical states, those states will, nonetheless have both mental and physical properties. So disallowing dualism with respect to substances and their states simply is to its reappearance at the level of the properties of those states.

There are two broad categories of mental property. Mental states such as thoughts and desires, often called ‘propositional attitudes’, have ‘content’ that can be de scribed by ‘that’ clauses. For example, one can have a thought, or desire, that it will rain. These states are said to have intentional properties, or ‘intentionality sensations’, such as pains and sense impressions, lack intentional content, and have instead qualitative properties of various sorts.

The problem about mental properties is widely thought to be most pressing for sensations, since the painful qualities of pains and the red quality of visual sensations seem to be irretrievably non-physical. And if mental states do actually have non-physical properties, the identity of mental states generate to physical states as they would not sustain a thoroughgoing mind-body materialism.

The Cartesian doctrine that the mental is in some way non-physical is so pervasive that even advocates of the identity theory sometimes accepted it, for the ideas that the mental is non-physical underlies, for example, the insistence by some identity theorists that mental properties are really neural as between being mental and physical. To be neural is in this way. A property would have to be neutral as to whether it’s mental at all. Only if one thought that being meant being non-physical would one hold that defending materialism required showing the ostensible mental properties are neutral as regards whether or not they’re mental.

But holding that mental properties are non-physical has a cost that is usually not noticed. A phenomenon is mental only if it has some distinctively mental property. So, strictly speaking, a materialist, who claims that mental properties are non-physical phenomena subsisting the state or fact of having independently been being actualized in the presence that present a reality that proves to exist. This is the ‘eliminative-Materialist position advanced by the American philosopher and critic Richard Rorty (1979).

According to Rorty (1931-) ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ are incompatible terms. Nothing can be both mental and physical, so mental states cannot be identical with bodily states. Rorty traces this incompatibly to our views about incorrigibility: ‘Mental’ and ‘physical’ are incorrigible reports of one’s own mental states, but not reports of physical occurrences, but he also argues that we can imagine a people who describe themselves and each other using terms just like our mental vocabulary, except that those people do not take the reports made with that vocabulary to be incorrigible. Since Rorty takes a state to be a mental state only if one’s reports about it are taken to be incorrigible, his imaginary people do not ascribe mental states to themselves or each other. Nonetheless, the only difference between their language and ours is that we take as incorrigible certain reports which they do not. So their language as no less descriptive or explanatory power than ours. Rorty concludes that our mental vocabulary is idle, and that there are no distinctively mental phenomena.

This argument variably rests on or upon the indeterminant contingence of its buildings incorrigibly into the meaning of the term ‘mental’. If we do not, the way is open to interpret Rorty’s imaginary people as simply having a different theory of mind from ours, on which reports of one’s own mental states are corrigible. Their reports would this be about mental states, as construed by their theory. Rorty’s thought experiment would then provide to conclude not that our terminology is idle, but only that this alternative theory of mental phenomena is correct. His thought experiment would thus sustain the non-eliminativist view that mental states are bodily states. Whether Rorty’s argument supports his eliminativist conclusion or the standard identity theory, therefore, depends solely on whether or not one holds that the mental is in some way non-physical.

Paul M. Churchlands (1981) advances a different argument for eliminative materialism. According to Churchlands, the common-sense concepts of mental states contained in our present folk psychology are, from a scientific point of view, radically defective. But we can expect that eventually a more sophisticated theoretical account will relace those folk-psychological concepts, showing that mental phenomena, as described by current folk psychology, do not exist. Since, that account would be integrated into the rest of science, we would have a thoroughgoing materialist treatment of all phenomena, unlike Rorty’s, does not rely of assuming that the mental is non-physical.

But even if current folk psychology is mistaken, that does not show that mental phenomenon does not exist, but only that they are of the way folk psychology described them as. We could conclude they do not exist only if the folk-psychological claims that turn out to be mistaken actually define what it is for some phenomena to be mental. Otherwise, the new theory would be about mental phenomena, and would help show that they’re identical with physical phenomena. Churchlands argument, like Rorty’s, depends on a special way of defining the mental, which we need not adopt, it’s likely that any argument for Eliminative materialism will require some such definition, without which the argument would instead support the identity theory.

Despite initial appearances, the distinctive properties of sensations are neutral as between being mental and physical, in that borrowed from the English philosopher and classicist Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), they are topic neutral: My having a sensation of red consists in my being in a state that is similar, in respect that we need not specify, even so, to something that occurs in me when I am in the presence of certain stimuli. Because the respect of similarity is not specified, the property is neither distinctively mental nor distinctively physical. But everything is similar to everything else in some respect or other. So leaving the respect of similarity unspecified makes this account too weak to capture the distinguishing properties of sensation.

A more sophisticated reply to the difficultly about mental properties is due independently to the Australian, David Malet Armstrong (1926-) and American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), who argued that for a state to be a particular sort of intentional state or sensation is for that state to bear characteristic causal relations to other particular occurrences. The properties in virtue of which e identify states as thoughts or sensations will still be neural as between being mental and physical, since anything can bear a causal relation to anything else. But causal connections have a better chance than similarity in some unspecified respect to capturing the distinguishing properties of sensations and thought.

This casual theory is appealing, but is misguided to attempt to construe the distinctive properties of mental states for being neutral as between being mental, and physical. To be neutral as regards being mental or physical is to be neither distinctively mental nor distinctively physical. But since thoughts and sensations are distinctively mental states, for a state to be a thought or a sensation is perforce for it to have some characteristically mental property. We inevitably lose the distinctively mental if we construe these properties for being neither mental nor physical.

Not only is the topic-neutral construal misguided: The problem it was designed to solve is equally so, only to say, that problem stemmed from the idea that mental must have some non-physical aspects. If not at the level of people or their mental states, then at the level of the distinctively mental properties of those states. However, it should be of mention, that properties can be more complicated, for example, in the sentence, ‘Walter is married to Julie’, we are attributing to Walter the property of being married, and unlike the property of Walter is bald. Consider the sentence: ‘Walter is bearded’. The word ‘Walter’ in this sentence is a bit of language ~ a name of some individual human being ~ and more some would be tempted to confuse the word with what it names. Consider the expression ‘is bald’, this too is a bit of language ~ philosophers call it a ‘predicate’ ~ and it brings to our attention some property or feature which, if the sentence is true. Is possessed by Walter? Understood in this way, a property is not its self linguist though it is expressed, or conveyed by something that is, namely a predicate. What might be said that a property is a real feature of the word, and that it should be contrasted just as sharply with any predicates we use to express it as the name ‘Walter’ is contrasted with the person himself. Controversially, just what sort of ontological status should be accorded to properties by describing ‘anomalous monism’, ~ while it’s conceivably given to a better understanding the similarity with the American philosopher Herbert Donald Davidson (1917-2003), wherefore he adopts a position that explicitly repudiates reductive physicalism, yet purports to be a version of materialism, nonetheless, Davidson holds that although token mental evident states are identical to those of physical events and states ~ mental ‘types’ -, i.e., kinds, and/or properties ~ are neither to, nor nomically co-existensive with, physical types. In other words, his argument for this position relies largely on the contention that the correct assignment of mental a actionable properties to a person is always a holistic matter, involving a global, temporally diachronic, ‘intentional interpretation’ of the person. But as many philosophers have in effect pointed out, accommodating claims of materialism evidently requires more than just repercussions of mental/physical identities. Mentalistic explanation presupposes not merely that metal events are causes but also that they have causal/explanatory relevance as mental -, i.e., relevance insofar as they fall under mental kinds or types. Nonetheless, Davidson’s position, which denies there are strict psychological or psychological laws, can accommodate the causal/explanation relevance of the mental quo mentally: If to ‘epiphenomenalism’ with respect to mental properties.

But the idea that the mental is in some respect non-physical cannot be assumed without argument. Plainly, the distinctively mental properties of the mental states are unlikely any other properties we know about. Only mental states have properties that are at all like the qualitative properties that anything like the intentional properties of thoughts and desires. However, this does not show that the mental properties are not physical properties, not all physical properties like the standard states: So, mental properties might still be special kinds of physical properties. It’s question beginning to assume otherwise. The doctrine that the mental properties is simply an expression of the Cartesian doctrine that the mental is automatically non-physical.

It is sometimes held that properties should count as physical properties only if they can be defined using the terms of physics. This to far to restrictively. Nobody would hold that to reduce biology to physics, for example, we must define all biological properties using only terms that occur in physics. And even putting ‘reduction’ aside, in certain biological properties could have been defined, that would not mean that those properties were in n way non-physical. The sense of ‘physical’ that is relevant that is of its situation it must be broad enough to include not only biological properties, but also most common-sense, macroscopic properties. Bodily states are uncontroversially physical in the relevant way. So, we can recast the identity theory as asserting that mental states are identical with bodily state.

In the course of reaching conclusions about the origin and limits of knowledge, Locke had occasioned in concerning himself with topics which are of philosophical interest in themselves. On of these is the question of identity, which includes, more specifically, the question of personal identity: What are the criteria by which a person at one time is numerically the same person as a person encountering of time? Locke points out whether ‘this is what was here before, it matters what kind of thing ‘this’ is meant to be. If ‘this’ is meant as a mass of matter then it is what was before so long as it consists of the same material panicles, but if it is meant as a living body then its considering of the same particles does mot matter and the case is different. ‘A colt grown up to a horse, sometimes fat, sometimes lean, is all the while the same horse, though . . . there may be a manifest change of the parts. So, when we think about personal identity, we need to be clear about a distinction between two things which ‘the ordinary way of speaking runs together’ ~ the idea of ‘man’ and the idea of ‘person’. As with any other animal, the identity of a man consists ‘in nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession initially united to the same organized body, however, the idea of a person is not that of a living body of a certain kind. A person is a ‘thinking’. ‘intelligent being, which has some sorts of reflection and such a being ‘will be the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to action past or to come’. Locke is at pains to argue that this continuity of self-consciousness does not necessarily involve the continuity of some immaterial substance, in the way that Descartes had held, for we all know, says Locke, consciousness and thought may be powers which can be possessed by ‘systems of matter fitly disposed’, and even if this is not so the question of the identity of a person is not the same as the question of the identity of an ‘immaterial; substance’. For just as the identity of as horse can be preserved through changes of matter and depended not on the identity of a continued material substance of its unity of one continued life. So the identity of a person does not depend on the continuity of a immaterial substance. The unity of one’s continued consciousness does not depend on its being ‘annexed’ only to one individual substance, [and not] . . . continued in a succession of several substances. For Lock e, then, personal identity consists in an identity of consciousness, and not in the identity of some substance whose essence it is to be conscious

Casual mechanisms or connections of meaning will help to take a historical route, and focus on the terms in which analytical philosophers of mind began to discuss seriously psychoanalytic explanation. These were provided by the long-standing and presently unconcluded debate over cause and meaning in psychoanalysis.

It is not hard to see why psychoanalysis should be viewed in terms of cause and meaning. On the one hand, Freud’s theories introduce a panoply of concepts which appear to characterize mental processes as mechanical and non-meaningful. Included are Freud’s neurological model of the mind, as outlined in his ‘Project or a Scientific Psychology’, more broadly, his ‘economic’ description of the mental, as having properties of force or energy, e.g., as ‘cathexing’ objects: And his account in the mechanism of repression. So it would seem that psychoanalytic explanation employs terms logically at variance with those of ordinary, common-sense psychology, where mechanisms do not play a central role. Bu t on the other hand, and equally striking, there is the fact that psychoanalysis proceeds through interpretation and engages on a relentless search for meaningful connections in mental life ~ something that even a superficial examination of the Interpretation of Dreams, or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, cannot fail to impress upon one. Psychoanalytic interpretation adduces meaningful connections between disparate and often apparently dissociated mental and behavioural phenomena, directed by the goal of ‘thematic coherence’. Of giving mental life the sort of unity that we find in a work of art or cogent narrative. In this respect, psychoanalysis would seem to adopt as its central plank the most salient feature of ordinary psychology, its insistence e on relating actions to reason for them through contentful characterizations of each that make their connection seem rational, or intelligible: A goal that seems remote from anything found in the physical sciences.

The application to psychoanalysis of the perspective afforded by the cause-meaning debate can also be seen as a natural consequence of another factor, namely the semi-paradoxical nature of psychoanalysis’ explananda. With respect to all irrational phenomena, something like a paradox arises. Irrationality involves a failure of a rational connectedness and hence of meaningfulness, and so, if it is to have an explanation of any kind, relations that are non-meaningful are causal appear to be needed. And, yet, as observed above, it would seem that, in offering explanations for irrationality ~ plugging the ‘gaps’ in consciousness ~ what psychoanalytic explanation hinges on is precisely the postulation of further, albeit non-apparent connections of meaning.

For these two reasons, then ~ the logical heterogeneity of its explanation and the ambiguous status of its explananda ~ it may seem that an examination in terms of the concepts of cause and meaning will provide the key to a philosophical elucidation of psychoanalysis. The possible views of psychoanalytic explanation that may result from such an examination can be arranged along two dimensions. (1) Psychoanalytic explanation may then be viewed after reconstruction, as either causal and non-meaningful, or meaningful and non-causal, or as comprising both meaningful and causal elements, in various combinations. Psychoanalytic explanation then may be viewed, on each of these reconstructions, as either licensed or invalidated depending one’s view of the logical nature of psychology.

So, for instance, some philosophical discussion infer that psychoanalytic explanation is void, simple on the grounds that it is committed to causality in psychology. On another, opposed view, it is the virtue of psychoanalytic explanation that it imputes causal relations, since only causal relations can be relevant to explaining the failures of meaningful psychological connections. On yet another view, it is psychoanalysis’ commitment to meaning which is its great fault: It s held that the stories that psychoanalysis tries to tell do not really, on examination, explain successfully. And so on.

It is fair to say that the debates between these various positions fail to establish anything definite about psychoanalytic explanation. There are two reasons for this. First, there are several different strands in Freud’s whitings, each of which may be drawn on, apparently conclusively, in support of each alternative reconstruction. Secondly, preoccupation with a wholly general problem in the philosophy of mind, that of cause and meaning, distracts attention from the distinguishing features of psychoanalytic explanation. At this point, and in order to prepare the way for a plausible reconstruction of psychoanalytic explanation. It is appropriate to take a step back, and take a fresh look at the cause-meaning issue in the philosophy of psychoanalysis.

Suppose, first, that some sort of cause-meaning compatibilism ~ such as that of the American philosopher Donald Davidson (1917-2003) -, holds for ordinary psychology, on this view, psychological explanation requires some sort of parallelism of causal and meaningful connections, grounded in the idea that psychological properties play causal roles determined by their content. Nothing in psychoanalytic explanation is inconsistent with this picture: After his abandonment of the early ‘Project’. Freud exceptionlessly viewed psychology as autonomous relative to neurophysiology, and at the same time as congruent with a broadly naturalistic world-view. ‘Naturalism’ is often used interchangeably with ‘physicalism’ and ‘materialism’, though each of these hints at specific doctrines. Thus, ‘physicalism’ suggests that, among the natural sciences, there is something especially fundamental about physics. And ‘materialism’ has connotations going back to eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century views of the world as essentially made of material particles whose behaviour is fundamental for explaining everything else. Moreover, ‘naturalism’ with respect to some realm is the view that everything that exists in that realm, and all those events that take place in it, are empirically accessible features of the world. Sometimes naturalism is taken to my that some realm can be in principle understood by appeal to the laws and theories of the natural sciences, but one must be careful as sine naturalism does not by itself imply anything about reduction. Historically, ‘natural’ contrasts with ‘supernatural’, but in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind where debate centres around the possibility of explaining mental phenomena as part of the natural order, it is the non-natural rather than the supernatural that is the contrasting notion. The naturalist holds that they can be so explained, while the opponent of naturalism thinks otherwise, though it is not intended that opposition to naturalism commits one to anything supernatural. Nonetheless, one should not take naturalism in regard as committing one to any sort of reductive explanation of that realm, and there are such commitments in the use of ‘physicalism’ and ‘materialism’.

If psychoanalytic explanation gives the impression that it imputes bare, meaning-free causality, this results from attending to only half the story, and misunderstanding what psychoanalysis means when it talks of psychological mechanisms. The economic descriptions of mental processes that psychoanalysis provides are never replacements for, but themselves always presuppose, characterizations of mental processes in terms of meaning. Mechanisms in psychoanalytic context are simply processes whose operation cannot be reconstructed as instances of rational functioning (they are what we might by preference call mental activities, by contrast with action) Psychoanalytic explanation’s postulation of mechanisms should not therefore be regarded as a regrettable and expugnable incursion of scientism into Freud’s thought, as is often claimed.

Suppose, alternatively, that hermeneuticists such as Habermas ~ who follow Dilthey beings as a interpretative practice to which the concepts of the physical sciences. Are given ~ are correct in thinking that connections of meaning are misrepresented through being described as causal? Again, this does not impact negatively o psychoanalytic explanation since, as just argued, psychoanalytic explanations nowhere impute meaning-free causation. Nothing is lost for psychoanalytic explanation I causation is excised from the psychological picture.

The conclusion must be that psychoanalytic explanation is at bottom indifferent to the general meaning-cause issue. The core of psychoanalysis consists in its tracing of meaningful connections with no greater or lesser commitment to causality than is involved in ordinary psychology. (Which helps to set the stage ~ pending appropriate clinical validation ~ for psychoanalysis to claim as much truth for its explanation as ordinary psychology?). Also, the true key to psychoanalytic explanation, its attribution of special kinds of mental states, not recognized in ordinary psychology, whose relations to one another do not have the form of patterns of inference or practical reasoning.

In the light of this, it is easy to understand why some compatibilities and hermeneuticists assert that their own view of psychology is uniquely consistent with psychoanalytic explanation. Compatibilities are right to think that, in order to provide for psychoanalytic explanation, it is necessary to allow mental connections that are unlike the connections of reasons to the actions that they rationalize, or to the beliefs that they support: And, that, in outlining such connections, psychoanalytic explanation must outstrip the resources of ordinary psychology, which does attempt to force as much as possible into the mould of practical reasoning. Hermeneuticists, for their part, are right to think that it would be futile to postulate connections which were nominally psychological but that characterized in terms of meaning, and that psychoanalytic explanation does not respond to the ‘paradox’ of irrationality by abandoning the search for meaningful connections.

Compatibilities are, however, wrong to think that non-rational but meaningful connections require the psychological order to be conceived as a causal order. The hermeneuticists is free to postulate psychological connections that are determined by meaning but not by rationality: It is coherent to suppose that there are connections of meaning that are not -bona fide- rational connections, without these being causal. Meaningfulness is a broader concept than rationality. (Sometimes this thought has been expressed, though not helpful, by saying that Freud discovered the existence of ‘neurotic rationality.) Despite the fact that an assumption of rationality is doubtless necessary to make sense of behaviour in general. It does not need to be brought into play in making sense of each instance of behaviour. Hermeneuticists, in turn, are wrong to think that the compatibility view psychology as causal signals a confusion of meaning with causality or that it must lead to compatibilism to deny that there is any qualitative difference between rational and irrational psychological connections.

All the same, the last two decades have been an intermittent interval through which times’ extraordinary changes, placing an encouraging well-situated plot in the psychology of the sciences. ‘Cognitive psychology’, which focuses on higher mental processes like reasoning, decision making, problem solving, language processing and higher-level processing, has become ~ perhaps, the ~ dominant paradigm among experimental psychologists, while behaviouristically oriented approaches have gradually fallen into disfavour.

The relationship between physical behaviour and agential behaviour is controversial. On some views, all ‘actions’ are identical; to physical changes in the subjects body, however, some kinds of physical behaviour, such as ‘reflexes’, are uncontroversially not kinds of agential behaviour. On others, a subject’s action must involve some physical change, but it is not identical to it.

Both physical and agential behaviours could be understood in the widest sense. Anything a person can do ~ even calculating in his head, for instance ~ could be regarded as agential behaviour. Likewise, any physical change in a person’s body ~ even the firing of a certain neuron, for instance ~ could be regarded as physical behaviour.

Of course, to claim that the mind is ‘nothing over and above’ such-and-such kinds of behaviour, construed as either physical or agential behaviour in the widest sense, is not necessarily to be a behaviourist. The theory that the mind is a series of volitional acts ~ a view close to the idealist position of George Berkeley (1685-1753) ~ and the theory that the mind is a certain configuration of neuronal events, while both controversial, are not forms of behaviourism.

Awaiting, right along side of an approaching account for which anomalous monism may take on or upon itself is the view that there is only one kind of substance underlying all others, changing and processes. It is generally used in contrast to ‘dualism’, though one can also think of it as denying what might be called ‘pluralism’ ~ a view often associated with Aristotle which claims that there are a number of substances, as the corpses of times generations have let it be known. Against the background of modern science, monism is usually understood to be a form of ‘materialism’ or ‘physicalism’. That is, the fundamental properties of matter and energy as described by physics are counted the only properties there are.

The position in the philosophy of mind known as ‘anomalous monism’ has its historical origins in the German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), but is universally identified with the American philosopher Herbert Donald Davidson (1917-2003), and it was he who coined the term. Davidson has maintained that one can be a monist ~ indeed, a physicalist ~ about the fundamental nature of things and events, while also asserting that there can be no full ‘reduction’ of the mental to the physical. (This is sometimes expressed by saying that there can be an ontological, though not a conceptual reduction.) Davidson thinks that complete knowledge of the brain and any related neurophysiological systems that support the mind’s activities would not themselves be knowledge of such things as belief, desire, experience and the rest of mentalistic generativist of thoughts. This is not because he thinks that the mind is somehow a separate kind of existence: Anomalous monism is after all monism. Rather, it is because the nature of mental phenomena rules out a priori that there will be law-like regularities connecting mental phenomena and physical events in the brain, and, without such laws, there is no real hope of explaining the mental via the physical structure of the brain.

All and all, one central goal of the philosophy of science is to provided explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies explored in the science. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explanations of central theoretical concepts involved in one or another science. in the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and thereby has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial concepts. If concepts of the simple (observational) sorts were internal physical structures that had, in this sense, an information-carrying function, a function they acquired during learning, then instances of these structure types would have a content that (like a belief) could be either true or false. In that of ant information-carrying structure carries all kinds of information if, for example, it carries information ‘A’, it must also carry the information that ‘A’ or ‘B’. Conceivably, the process of learning is supposed to be a process in which a single piece of this information is selected for special treatment, thereby becoming the semantic content ~ the meaning ~ of subsequent tokens of that structure type. Just as we conventionally give artefacts and instruments information-providing functions, thereby making their flashing lights, and so forth ~ representations of the conditions in the world in which we are interested, so learning converts neural states that carry information ~ ‘pointer readings’ in the head, so to speak ~ in structures that have the function of providing some vital piece of information they carry when this process occurs in the ordinary course of learning, the functions in question develop naturally. They do not, as do the functions of instruments and artefacts, depends on the intentions, beliefs, and attitudes of users. We do not give brain structure these functions. They get it by themselves, in some natural way, either (in the case of the senses) from their selectional history or (in the case of thought) from individual learning. The result is a network of internal representations that have (in different ways) the power representation, of experience and belief.

To understand that this approach to ‘thought’ and ‘belief’, the approach that conceives of them as forms of internal representation, is not a version of ‘functionalism’ ~ at least, not if this dely held theory is understood, as it often is, as a theory that identifies mental properties with functional properties. For functional properties have to do with the way something, is, in fact, behaves, with its syndrome of typical causes and effects. An informational model of belief, in order to account for misrepresentation, a problem with which a preliminary way that in both need something more than a structure that provided information. It needs something having that as its function. It needs something that is supposed to provide information. As Sober (1985) comments for an account of the mind we need functionalism with the function, the ‘teleological’, is put back in it.

Philosophers need not (and typically do not) assume that there is anything wrong with the science they are studying. Their goal is simply to provide accounts of he theories, concepts and explanatory strategies that scientists are using ~ accounts that are more explicit, systematic and philosophically sophisticated than the often rather rough-and-ready accounts offered by the scientists themselves.

Cognitive psychology is in many ways a curious and puzzling science. Many of the theories put forward by cognitive psychologists make use of a family of ‘intentional’ concepts ~ like believing that ‘, desiring that ‘q’, and representing ‘r’ ~ which do not appear in the physical or biological sciences, and these intentional concepts play a crucial role in many of the explanations offered by these theories.

It is characteristic of dialectic awareness that discussions of intentionality appeared as the paradigm cases discussed which usually are beliefs or sometimes beliefs and desires, however, the biologically most basic forms of intentionality are in perception and in intentional action. These also have certain formal features which are not common to beliefs and desire. Consider a case of perceptual experience. Suppose that I see my hand in front of my face. What are the conditions of satisfaction? First, the perceptual experience of the hand in front of my face has as its condition of satisfaction that there be a hand in front of my face. Thus far, the condition of satisfaction is the same as the belief than there is a hand in front of my face. But with perceptual experience there is this difference: In order that the intentional content be satisfied, the fact that there is a hand in front of my face must cause the very experience whose intentional content is that there is a hand in front of my face. This has the consequence that perception has a special kind of condition of satisfaction that we might describe as ‘causally self-referential’. The full conditions of satisfaction of the perceptual experience are, first that there be a hand in front of my face, and second, that there is a hand in front of my face caused the very experience of whose conditions of satisfaction forms a part. We can represent this in our acceptation of the form. S(p), such as:

Visual experience (that there is a hand in front of face

and the fact that there is a hand in front of my face

is causing this very experience.)

Furthermore, visual experiences have a kind of conscious immediacy not characterised of beliefs and desires. A person can literally be said to have beliefs and desires while sound asleep. But one can only have visual experiences of a non-pathological kind when one is fully awake and conscious because the visual experiences are themselves forms of consciousness.

People’s decisions and actions are explained by appeal to their beliefs and desires. Perceptual processes, sensational, are said to result in mental states which represent (or sometimes misrepresent) one or as another aspect of the cognitive agent’s environment. Other theorists have offered analogous acts, if differing in detail, perhaps, the most crucial idea in all of this is the one about representations. There is perhaps a sense in which what happens at, the level of the retina constitutes, as a result of the processes occurring in the process of stimulation, some kind of representation of what produces that stimulation, and thus, some kind of representation of the objects of perception. Or so it may seem, if one attempts to describe the relation between the structure and characteristic of the object of perception and the structure and nature of the retinal processes. One might say that the nature of that relation is such as to provide information about the part of the world perceived, in the sense of ‘information’ presupposed when one says that the rings in the sectioning of a tree’s truck provide information of its age. This is because there is an appropriate causal relation between the things which make it impossible for it to be a matter of chance. Subsequently processing can then be thought to be one carried out on what is provided in the representations in question.

However, if there are such representations, they are not representations for the perceiver, it is the thought that perception involves representations of that kind which produced the old, and now largely discredited philosophical theories of perception which suggested that perception is a matter, primarily, of an apprehension of mental states of some kind, e.g., sense-data, which are representatives of perceptual objects, either by being caused by them or in being in some way constitutive of them. Also, if it be said that the idea of information so invoked indicates that there is a sense in which the processes of stimulation can be said to have content, but a non-conceptual content, distinct from the content provided by the subsumption of what is perceived under concepts. It must be emphasised that, that content is not one of the perceivers. What the information-processing story provides, at best, a more adequate categorization than previously available of the causal processes involved. That may be important, but more should not be claimed for it than there is. If in perception is a given case one can be said to have an experience as of an object of a certain shape and kind related to another object it is because there is presupposed in that perception the possession of concepts of objects, and more particular, a concept of space and how objects occupy space.

It is, that, nonetheless, cognitive psychologists occasionally say a bit about the nature of intentional concepts and the nature of intentional concepts and the explanations that exploit them. Their comments are rarely systematic or philosophically illuminating. Thus, it is hardly surprising that many philosophers have seen cognitive psychology as fertile grounds for the sort of careful descriptive work that is done in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of physics. The American philosopher of mind Alan Jerry Fodor’s (1935-), The Language of Thought (1975) was a pioneering study in the genre on the field. Philosophers have, also, done important and widely discussed work in what might be called the ‘descriptive philosophy’ or ‘cognitive psychology’.

These philosophical accounts of cognitive theories and the concepts they invoke are generally much more explicit than the accounts provided by psychologists, and they inevitably smooth over some of the rough edges of scientists’ actual practice. But if the account they give of cognitive theories diverges significantly from the theories that psychologists actually produce, then the philosophers have just got it wrong. There is, however, a very different way in which philosopher’s have approached cognitive psychology. Rather than merely trying to characterize what cognitive psychology is actually doing, some philosophers try to say what it should and should not be doing. Their goal is not to explicate scientific practice, but to criticize and improve it. The most common target of this critical approach is the use of intentional concepts in cognitive psychology. Intentional notions have been criticized on various grounds. The two situated consideration are that they fail to supervene on the physiology of the cognitive agent, and that they cannot be ‘naturalized’.

Perhaps e easiest way to make the point about ‘supervenience is to use a thought experiment of the sort originally proposed by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-). Suppose that in some distant corner of the universe there is a planet, Twin Earth, which is very similar to our own planet. On Twin Earth, there is a person who is an atom for atom replica of J.F. Kennedy. Now the President J.F. Kennedy, who lives on Earth believe s that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Tennessee. If you asked him. ‘Was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. born in Tennessee, In all probability the answer would either or not it is yes or no? Twin, Kennedy would respond in the same way, but it is not because he believes that our Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? Was, as, perhaps, very much in question of what is true or false? His beliefs are about Twin-Luther, and that Twin -Luther was certainly not born in Tennessee, and thus, that J.F. Kennedy’s belief is true while Twin-Kennedy’s is false. What all this is supposed to show is that two people, perhaps on opposite polarities of justice, or justice as drawn on or upon human rights, can share all their physiological properties without sharing all their intentional properties. To directorially place this into a problem for cognitive psychology, two additional premises are needed. The first is that cognitive psychology attempts to explain behaviour by appeal to people’s intentional properties. The second, is that psychological explanations should not appeal to properties that fall to supervene on an organism’s physiology. (Variations on this theme can be found in the American philosopher Allen Jerry Fodor (1987)).

The thesis that the mental is supervenient on the physical ~ roughly, the claim that the mental character of a wholly determinant of its rendering adaptation of its physical nature ~ has played a key role in the formulation of some influential positions of the ‘mind-body’ problem. In particular versions of non-reductive ‘physicalism’, and has evoked in arguments about the mental, and has been used to devise solutions to some central problems about the mind ~ for example, the problem of mental causation.

The idea of supervenience applies to one but not to the other, that this, there could be no difference in a moral respect without a difference in some descriptive, or non-moral respect evidently, the idea generalized so as to apply to any two sets of properties (to secure greater generality it is more convenient to speak of properties that predicates). The American philosopher Donald Herbert Davidson (1970), was perhaps first to introduce supervenience into the rhetoric discharging into discussions of the mind-body problem, when he wrote ‘ . . . mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respectfulness, or that an object cannot alter in some metal deferential submission without altering in some physical regard. Following, the British philosopher George Edward Moore (1873-1958) and the English moral philosopher Richard Mervyn Hare (1919-2003), from whom he avowedly borrowed the idea of supervenience. Donald Herbert Davidson, went on to assert that supervenience in this sense is consistent with the irreducibility of the supervened to their ‘subvenient’, or ‘base’ properties. Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition . . . ‘

Thus, three ideas have purposively come to be closely associated with supervenience: (1) Property convariation, (if two things are indiscernible in base properties they must be indiscernible in supervenient properties). (2) Dependence, (supervenient properties are dependent on, or determined by, their subservient bases) and (3) Non-reducibility (property convariation and dependence involved in supervenience can obtain even if supervenient properties are not reducible to their base properties.)

Nonetheless, in at least, for the moment, supervenience of the mental ~ in the form of strong supervenience, or, at least global supervenience ~ is arguably a minimum commitment to physicalism. But can we think of the thesis of mind-body supervenience itself as a theory of the mind-body relation ~ that is, as a solution to the mind-body problem?

It would seem that any serious theory addressing the mind-body problem must say something illuminating about the nature of psychophysical dependence, or why, contrary to common belief, there is no dependence in either way. However, if we take to consider the ethical naturalist intuitivistic will say that the supervenience, and also the dependence, for which is a brute fact you discern through moral intuition: And the prescriptivist will attribute the supervenience to some form of consistency requirements on the language of evaluation and prescription. And distinct from all of these is Mereological supervenience, namely the supervenience of properties of a whole on properties and relations of its pats. What all this shows, is that there is no single type of dependence relation common to all cases of supervenience, supervenience holds in different cases for different reasons, and does not represent a type of dependence that can be put alongside causal dependence, meaning dependence, Mereological dependence, and so forth.

There seems to be a promising strategy for turning the supervenience thesis into a more substantive theory of mind, and it is that to explicate mind-body supervenience as a special case of Mereological supervenience ~ that is, the dependence of the properties of a whole on the properties and relations characterizing its proper parts. Mereological dependence does seem to be a special form of dependence that is metaphysically sui generis and highly important. If one takes this approach, one would have to explain psychological properties as macroproperties of a whole organism that covary, in appropriate ways, with its microproperties, i.e., the way its constituent organs, tissues, and so forth, are organized and function. This more specific supervenience thesis may well be a serious theory of the mind-body relation that can compete for the classic options in the field.

On this topic, as with many topics in philosophy, there is a distinction to be made between (1) certain vague, partially inchoate, pre-theoretic ideas and beliefs about the matter at hand, and (2) certain more precise, more explicit, doctrines or theses that are taken to articulate or explicate those pre-theoretic ideas and beliefs. There are various potential ways of precisifying our pre-theoretic conception of a physicalist or materialist account of mentality, and the question of how best to do so is itself a matter for ongoing, dialectic, philosophical inquiry.

The view concerns, in the first instance, at least, the question of how we, as ordinary human beings, in fact go about ascribing beliefs to one another. The idea is that we do this on the basis of our knowledge of a common-sense theory of psychology. The theory is not held to consist in a collection of grandmotherly saying, such as ‘once bitten, twice shy’. Rather it consists in a body of generalizations relating psychological states to each other to input from the environment, and to actions. Such may be founded on or upon the grounds that show or include the following:

(1) (x)(p)(if x fears that p, then x desires that not-p.)

(2) (x)(p)(if x hopes that p and ✸ hopes that p and

✸ discovers that p, then ✸ is pleased that p.)

(3) (x)(p)(q) (If x believes that p and ✸ believes that

if p, then q, barring confusion, distraction and so

forth ✸ believes that q.)

(4) (x)(p)(q) (If x desires that p and x believes that if q then

p, and x is able to bring it about that q, then, barring

conflict desires or preferred strategies, x brings it about

that q.)

All of these generalizations should be understood as containing ceteris paribus clauses. (1) For example, applies most of the time, but variably. Adventurous types often enjoy the adrenal thrill produced by fear. This leads them, on occasion, to desire the very state of affairs that frightens them. Analogously, with (3). A subject who believes that ‘p’ nd believes that if ‘p’, then ‘q’. Would typically infer that ‘q?’. But certain atypical circumstances may intervene: Subjects may become confused or distracted, or they ma y find the prospect of ‘q’ so awful that they dare not allow themselves to believe it. The ceteris paribus nature of these generalizations is not usually considered to be problematic, since atypical circumstances are, of course, atypical, and the generalizations are applicable most of the time.

We apply this psychological theory to make inference about people’s beliefs, desires and so forth. If, for example, we know that Julie believes that if she is to be at the airport at four, then she should get a taxi at half past two, and she believes that she is to be at the airport at four, then we will predict, using (3), that Julie will infer that she should get a taxi at half past two.

The Theory-Theory, as it is called, is an empirical theory addressing the question of our actual knowledge of beliefs. Taken in its purest form if addressed both first and third-person knowledge: We know about our own beliefs and those of others in the same way, by application of common-sense psychological theory in both cases. However, it is not very plausible to hold that we always ~ or, indeed usually ~ know our own beliefs by way of theoretical inference. Since it is an empirical theory concerning one of our cognitive abilities, the Theory-Theory is open to psychological scrutiny. Various issues of the hypothesized common-sense psychological theory, we need to know whether it is known consciously or unconsciously. Nevertheless, research has revealed that three-year-old children are reasonably god at inferring the beliefs of others on the basis of actions, and at predicting actions on the basis of beliefs that others are known to possess. However, there is one area in which three-year-old’s psychological reasoning differs markedly from adults. Tests of the sorts are rationalized in such that: ‘False Belief Tests’, reveal largely consistent results. Three-year-old subjects are witness to the scenario about the child, Billy, sees his mother place some biscuits in a biscuit tin. Billy then goes out to play, and, unseen by him, his mother removes the biscuit from the tin and places them in a jar, which is then hidden in a cupboard. When asked, ‘Where will Billy look for the biscuits’? The majority of three-year-olds answer that Billy will look in the jar in the cupboard ~ where the biscuits actually are, than where Billy saw them being placed. On being asked ‘Where does Billy think the biscuits are’? They again, tend to answer ‘in the cupboard’, rather than ‘in the jar’. Three-year-olds thus, appear to have some difficulty attributing false beliefs to others in case in which it would be natural for adults to do so. However, it appears that three-year-olds are lacking the idea of false beliefs in general, nor does it appear that they struggle with attributing false beliefs in other kinds of situation. For example, they have little trouble distinguishing between dreams and play, on the one hand, and true beliefs or claims on the other. By the age of four and a half years, most children pass the False Belief Tests fairly consistently. There is yet no general accepted theory of why three-year-olds fare so badly with the false beliefs tests, nor of what it reveals about their conception of beliefs.

Recently some philosophers and psychologists have put forward what they take to be an alternative to the Theory-Theory: However, the challenge does not end there. We need also to consider the vital element of making appropriate adjustments for differences between one’s own psychological states and those of the other. Nevertheless, it is implausible to think in every such case of simulation, yet alone will provide the resolving obtainability to achieve.

The evaluation of the behavioural manifestations of belief, desires, and intentions are enormously varied, every bit as suggested. When we move away from perceptual beliefs, the links with behaviour are intractable and indirect: The expectation I form on the basis of a particular belief reflects the influence of numerous other opinions, my actions are formed by the totality of my preferences and all those opinions which have a bearing on or upon them. The causal processes that produce my beliefs reflect my opinions about those processes, about their reliability and the interference to which they are subject. Thus, behaviour justifies the ascription of a particular belief only by helping to warrant a more inclusive interpretation of the overall cognitive position of the individual in question. Psychological descriptions, like translation, is a ‘holistic’ business. And once this is taken into account, it is all the less likely that a common physical trait will be found which grounds all instances of the same belief. The ways in which all of our propositional altitudes interact in the production of behaviour reinforce the anomalous character of the mental and render any sort of reduction of the mental to the physical impossibilities. Such is not meant as a practical procedure, it can, however, generalize on this so that interpretation and merely translation is at issue, has made this notion central to methods of accounting responsibilities of the mind.

Theory and Theory-Theory are two, as many think competing, views of the nature of our common-sense, propositional attitude explanations of action. For example, when we say that our neighbour cut down his apple tree because he believed that it was ruining his patio and did not want it ruined, we are offering a typically common-sense explanation of his action in terms of his beliefs and desires. But, even though wholly familiar, it is not clear what kind of explanation is at issue. Connected of one view, is the attribution of beliefs and desires that are taken as the application to actions of a theory which, in its informal way, functions very much like theoretical explanations in science. This is known as the ‘theory-theory’ of every day psychological explanation. In contrast, it has been argued that our propositional attributes are not theoretical claims do much as reports of a kind of ‘simulation’. On such a ‘simulation theory’ of the matter, we decide what our neighbour will do (and thereby why he did so) by imagining himself in his position and deciding what we would do.

The Simulation Theorist should probably concede that simulations need to be backed up by the independent means of discovering the psychological states of others. But they need not concede that these independent means take the form of a theory. Rather, they might suggest that we can get by with some rules of thumb, or straightforward inductive reasoning of a general kind.

A second and related difficulty with the Simulation Theory concerns our capacity to attribute beliefs that are too alien to be easily simulated: Beliefs of small children, or psychotics, or bizarre beliefs deeply suppressed in the unconscious latencies. The small child refuses to sleep in the dark: He is afraid that the Wicked Witch will steal him away. No matter how many adjustments we make, it may be hard for mature adults to get their own psychological processes, even in pretended play, to mimic the production of such belief. For the Theory-Theory alien beliefs are not particularly problematic: So long as they fit into the basic generalizations of the theory, they will be inferrable from the evidence. Thus, the Theory-Theory can account better for our ability to discover more bizarre and alien beliefs than can the Simulation Theory.

The Theory-Theory and the Simulation Theory are not the only proposals about knowledge of belief. A third view has its origins in the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). On this view both the Theory and Simulation Theories attribute too much psychologizing to our common-sense psychology. Knowledge of other minds is, according to this alternative picture, more observational in nature. Beliefs, desires, feelings are made manifest to us in the speech and other actions of those with whom we share a language and way of life. When someone says. ‘Its going to rain’ and takes his umbrella from his bag. It is immediately clear to us that he believes it is going to rain. In order to possess an intellectual hold of we neither theorize nor simulate: We just perceive, of course, this is not straightforward visual perception of the sort that we use to see the umbrella. But it is like visual perception in that it provides immediate and non-inferential awareness of its objects. We might call this the ‘Observational Theory’.

The Observational Theory does not seem to accord very well with the fact that we frequently do have to indulge in a fair amount of psychologizing to find in what others believe. It is clear that any given action might be the upshot of any number of different psychological attitudes. This applies even in the simplest cases. For example, because one’s friend is suspended from a dark balloon near a beehive, with the intention of stealing honey. This idea to make the bees behave that it is going to rain and therefore believe that the balloon as a dark cloud, and therefore pay no attention to it, and so fail to notice one’s dangling friend. Given this sort of possibility, the observer would surely be rash immediately to judge that the agent believes that it is going to rain. Rather, they would need to determine ~ perhaps, by theory, perhaps by simulation ~ which of the various clusters of mental states that might have led to the action, actually did so. This would involve bringing in further knowledge of the agent, the background circumstances and so forth. It is hard to see how the sort of complex mental process involved in this sort of psychological reflection could be assimilated to any kind of observation.

The attributions of intentionality that depend on optimality or rationality are interpretations of the assumptive phenomena ~ a ‘heuristic overlay’ (1969), describing an inescapable idealized ‘real pattern’. Like such abstractions, as centres of gravity and parallelograms of force, the beliefs and desires posited by the highest stance have noo independent and concrete existence, and since this is the case, there would be no deeper facts that could settle the issue if ~ most importantly ~ rival intentional interpretations arose that did equally well at rationalizing the history of behaviour f an entity. Orman van William Quine (1908-2000), the most influential American philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century, whose thesis on the indeterminacy of radical translation carries all the way in the thesis of the indeterminacy of radical interpretation of mental states and processes.

The fact that cases of radical indeterminacy, though possible in principle, are vanishingly unlikely ever to comfort us in small solacing refuge and shelter, apparently this idea is deeply counter-intuitive to many philosophers, who have hankered for more ‘realistic’ doctrines. There are two different strands of ‘realism’ that in the attempt to undermine are such:

(1) Realism about the entities purportedly described by four

everyday mentalistic discourse ~ what I dubbed as

folk-psychology, such as beliefs, desires, pains, the self.

(2) Realism about content itself ~ the idea that there have

to be events or entities that really have intentionality

(as opposed to the events and entities that only have as

if they had intentionality).

The tenet indicated by (1) rests of what is fatigue, what bodily states or events are so fatiguing, that they are identical with, and so forth. This is a confusion that calls for diplomacy, not philosophical discovery: The choice between an ‘eliminative materialism’ and an ‘identity theory’ of fatigues is not a matter of which ‘ism’ is right, but of which way of speaking is most apt to wean these misbegotten features of them as conceptual schemata.

Again, the tenet (2) my attack has been more indirect. The view that some philosophers, in that of a demand for content realism as an instance of a common philosophical mistake: Philosophers oftentimes manoeuvre themselves into a position from which they can see only two alternatives: Infinite regress versus some sort of ‘intrinsic’ foundation ~ a prime mover of one sort or another. For instance, it has seemed obvious that for some things to be valuable as means, other things must be intrinsically valuable ~ ends in themselves ~ otherwise we would be stuck with a vicious regress (or, having no beginning or end) of things valuable only that although some intentionality is ‘derived’ (the ‘aboutness’ of the pencil marks composing a shopping list is derived from the intentions of the person whose list it is), unless some intentionality is ‘original’ and underived, there could be no derived intentionality.

There is always another alternative, namely, a finite regress that peters out without marked foundations or thresholds or essences. Here is an avoided paradox: Every mammal has a mammal for a mother ~ but, this implies an infinite genealogy of mammals, which cannot be the case. The solution is not to search for an essence of mammalhood that would permit us in principle to identify the Prime Mammal, but rather to tolerate a finite regress that connects mammals to their non-mammalian ancestors by a sequence that can only be partitioned arbitrarily. The reality of today’s mammals is secure without foundations.

The best instance of this theme is held to the idea that the way to explain the miraculous-seeming powers of an intelligent intentional system is to decompose it into hierarchically structured teams of ever more stupid intentional systems, ultimately discharging all intelligence-debts in a fabric of stupid mechanisms. Lycan (1981), has called this view ‘homuncular functionalism’. One may be tempted to ask: Are the subpersonal components ‘real’ intentional systems? At what point in the diminutions of prowess as we descend to simple neurons does ‘real’ intentionality disappear? Don’t ask. The reasons for regarding an individual neuron (or a thermostat) as a intentional system are unimpressive, but zero, and the security of our intentional attributions at the highest lowest-level of real intentionality. Another exploitation of the same idea is found in Elbow Room (1984): At what point in evolutionary history did real reason-appreciators real selves, make their appearance? Don’t ask ~ for the dame reason. Here is yet another, more fundamental versions of evolution can point in the early days of evolution can we speak of genuine function, genuine selection-for and not mere fortuitous preservation of entities that happen to have some self-replicative capacity? Don’t ask. Many of the more interesting and important features of our world have emerged, gradually, from a world that initially lacked them ~ function, intentionality, consciousness, morality, value ~ and it is a fool’s errand to try to identify a first or most-simple of an instance of the ‘real’ thin. It is for the same reason a mistake must exist to answer all the questions our system of cognitive content attribution permit us to ask. Tom says he has an older brother in Toronto and that he is an only child. What does he really believe? Could he really believe that he had a but if he also believed he was an only child? What is the ‘real’ content of his mental state? There is no reason to suppose there is a principled answer.

The most sweeping conclusion having drawn from this theory of content is that the large and well-regarded literature on ‘propositional attitudes’ (especially the debates over wide versus narrow content) is largely a disciplinary artefact of no long-term importance whatever, except perhaps, as history’s most slowly unwinding unintended reductio ad absurdum. By and large, the disagreements explored in that literature cannot even be given an initial expression unless one takes on the assumption of an unsounded fundamentality of strong realism about content, and its constant companion, the idea of a ‘language of thought’ a system of mental representation that is decomposable into elements rather like terms, and large elements rather like sentences. The illusion, that this is plausible, or even inevitable, is particularly fostered by the philosophers’ normal tactic of working from examples of ‘believing-that-p’ that focuses attention on mental states that are directly or indirectly language-infected, such as believing that the shortest spy is a spy, or believing that snow is white. (Do polar bears believe that snow is white? In the way we do?) There are such states ~ in language-using human beings ~ but, they are not exemplary r foundational states of belief, needing a term for them. As, perhaps, in calling the term in need of, as they represent ‘opinions’. Opinions play a large, perhaps even decisive role in our concept of a person, but they are not paradigms of the sort of cognitive element to which one can assign content in the first instance. If one starts, as one should, with the cognitive states and events occurring in non-human animals, and uses these as the foundation on which to build theories of human cognition, the language-infected states are more readily seen to be derived, less directly implicated in the explanation of behaviour, and the chief but an illicit source of plausibility of the doctrine of a language of thought. Postulating a language of thought is in any event a postponement of the central problems of content ascribed, not a necessary first step.

Our momentum, forces out the causal theories of epistemology, of what makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? It is natural to think that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals depends on what causes the subject to have the belief. In recent decades a number of epistemologists have pursued this plausible idea with a variety of specific proposals. For some proposed casual criteria for knowledge and justification are for us, to take under consideration.

Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that ‘p’ is knowledge just in case it has the right sort of causal connection to the fact that ‘p’. Such a criteria can be applied only to cases where the fact that ‘p’, a sort that can enter into causal relations: This seems to exclude mathematical and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization. And proponents of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual knowledge of particular facts about the subject’s environment.

For example, the forthright Australian materialist David Malet Armstrong (1973), proposed that a belief of the form ‘This (perceived) object is ‘F’ is (non-inferential) knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is ‘F’, that is, the fact that the object is ‘F’ contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictate that, for any subject ‘x’ and perceived object ‘y’. If ‘x’ has those properties and believes that ‘y’ is ‘F’, then ‘y’ is ‘F’. Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account in terms of the belief’s being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is ‘F’.

This sort of condition fails, however, to be sufficient for non-inferential perceptual knowledge because it is compatible with the belief’s being unjustified, and an unjustified belief cannot be knowledge. For example, suppose that your mechanisms for colour perception are working well, but you have been given good reason to think otherwise, to think, say, that any tinted colour in things that look brownishly-tinted to you and brownishly-tinted things look of any tinted colour. If you fail to heed these results you have for thinking that your colour perception is awry and believe of a thing that look’s colour tinted to you that it is colour tinted, your belief will fail to b e justified and will therefore fail to be knowledge, even though it is caused by the thing’s being tinted in such a way as to be a completely reliable sign (or to carry the information) that the thing is tinted or found of some tinted discolouration.

One could fend off this sort of counter-example by simply adding to the causal condition the requirement that the belief be justified. But this enriched condition would still be insufficient. Suppose, for example, that in an experiment you are given a drug that in nearly all people (but not in you, as it happens) causes the aforementioned aberration in colour perception. The experimenter tells you that you’re taken such a drug that says, ‘No, wait a minute, the pill you took was just a placebo’. But suppose further that this last ting the experimenter tells that you are false. Her telling you this gives you justification for believing of a thing that looks colour tinted or tinged in brownish tones, but in fact about this justification that is unknown to you (that the experimenter’s last statement was false) makes it the casse that your true belief is not knowledge even though it satisfies Armstrong’s causal condition.

Goldman (1986) has proposed an important different sort of causal criterion, namely, that a true belief is knowledge if it is produced by a type of process that a ‘global’ and ‘locally’ reliable. It is global reliability of its propensity to cause true beliefs is sufficiently high. Local reliability had to do with whether the process would have produced a similar but false belief in certain counter-factual situations alternative to the actual situation. This way of marking off true beliefs that are knowledge e does not require the fact believed to be causally related to the belief and so it could in principle apply to knowledge of any kind of truth.

Goldman requires the global reliability of the belief-producing process for the justification of a belief, he requires, also for knowledge because justification is required for knowledge. What he requires for knowledge but suffices to say that it is not required for justification as local reliability. His idea is that a justified true belief is knowledge if the type of process that produced it would not have produced it in any relevant counter-factual situation in which it is

The theory of relevant alternative is best understood as an attempt to accommodate two opposing strands in our thinking about knowledge. The first is that knowledge is an absolute concept. On one interpretation, tis means that the justification or evidence one must have an order to know a proposition ‘p’ must be sufficient to eliminate all the alternatives to ‘p’ (when an alternative to a proposition ‘p’ is a proposition incompatible with ‘p’).

For knowledge requires only that elimination of the relevant alternatives. So the relevant alternatives view preservers both strands in our thinking about knowledge. Knowledge is an absolute concept, but because the absoluteness is relative to a standard, we can know many things.

The relevant alternative’s account of knowledge can be motivated by noting that other concepts exhibit the same logical structure e. two examples of this are the concepts ‘flat’ and the concept ‘empty’. Both appear to be absolute concepts ~ a space is empty only if it does not contain anything and a surface is flat only if it does not have any bumps. However, the absolute character of these concepts is relative to a standard. In the case of flat, there is a standard for what there is a standard for what counts as a bump and in the case of empty, there is a standard for what counts as a thing. We would not deny that a table is flat because a microscope reveals irregularities in its surface. Nor would we den y that a warehouse is empty because it contains particles of dust. To be flat is to be free of any relevant bumps. To be empty is to be devoid of all relevant things. Analogously, the relevant alternative’s theory says that to know a proposition is to have evidence that eliminates all relevant alternatives.

Some philosophers have argued that the relevant alternative’s theory of knowledge entails the falsity of the principle that set of known (by S) propositions in closed under known (by S) entailment, although others have disputed this however, this principle affirms the following conditional or the closure principle:

If ‘S’ knows ‘p’ and ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ entails ‘q’, then ‘S’ knows ‘q’.

According to the theory of relevant alternatives, we can know a proposition ‘p’, without knowing that some (non-relevant) alterative to ‘p’ is false. But, once an alternative ‘h’ to ‘p’ incompatible with ‘p’, then ‘p’ will trivially entail not-h. So it will be possible to know some proposition without knowing another proposition trivially entailed by it. For example, we can know that we see a zebra without knowing that it is not the case that we see a cleverly disguised mule (on the assumption that ‘ewe see a cleverly disguised mule’ is not a relevant alterative). This will involve a violation of the closure principle. This is an interesting consequence of the theory because the closure principle seems to many to be quite intuitive. In fact, we can view sceptical arguments as employing the closure principle as a premise, along with the premise that we do not know that the alternatives raised by the sceptic are false. From these two premisses, it follows (on the assumption that we see that the propositions we believe entail the falsity of sceptical alternatives) that we do not know the proposition we believe. For example, it follows from the closure principle and the fact that we do not know that we do not see a cleverly disguised mule, that we do not know that we see a zebra. We can view the relevant alternative’s theory as replying to the sceptical arguments by denying the closure principle.

What makes an alternative relevant? What standard do the alternatives raised by the sceptic fail to meet? These notoriously difficult to answer with any degree of precision or generality. This difficulty has led critics to view the theory as something being to obscurity. The problem can be illustrated though an example. Suppose Smith sees a barn and believes that he does, on the basis of very good perceptual evidence. When is the alternative that Smith sees a paper-maché replica relevant? If there are many such replicas in the immediate area, then this alternative can be relevant. In these circumstances, Smith fails to know that he sees a barn unless he knows that it is not the case that he sees a barn replica. Where no such replica exist, this alternative will not be relevant. Smith can know that he sees a barn without knowing that he does not see a barn replica.

This suggests that a criterion of relevance is something like probability conditional on Smith’s evidence and certain features of the circumstances. But which circumstances in particular do we count? Consider a case where we want the result that the barn replica alternative is clearly relevant, e.g., a case where the circumstances are such that there are numerous barn replicas in the area. Does the suggested criterion give us the result we wanted? The probability that Smith sees a barn replica given his evidence and his location to an area where there are many barn replicas is high. However, that same probability conditional on his evidence and his particular visual orientation toward a real barn is quite low. We want the probability to be conditional on features of the circumstances like the former bu t not on features of the circumstances like the latter. But how do we capture the difference in a general formulation?

How significant a problem is this for the theory of relevant alternatives? This depends on how we construe theory. If the theory is supposed to provide us with an analysis of knowledge, then the lack of precise criteria of relevance surely constitute a serious problem. However, if the theory is viewed instead as providing a response to sceptical arguments, it can be argued that the difficulty has little significance for the overall success of the theory.

What justifies the acceptance of a theory? Although particular versions of empiricism have met many criticisms, it still attractive to look for an answer in some sort of empiricist terms: In terms, that is, of support by the available evidence. How else could objectivity of science be defended except by showing that its conclusions (and in particular its theoretical conclusion ~ those theories it presently accepts) are somehow legitimately based on agreed observational and experimental evidence? But, as is well known, theories in general pose a problem for empiricism.

Allowing the empiricist the assumption that there are observational statements whose truth-values can be inter-subjectively agreed, and show the exploratory, non-demonstrative use of experiment in contemporary science. Yet philosophers identify experiments with observed results, and these with the testing of theory. They assume that observation provides an open window for the mind onto a world of natural facts and regularities, and that the main problem for the scientist is to establish the unique or the independence of a theoretical interpretation. Experiments merely enable the production of (true) observation statements. Shared, replicable observations are the basis for scientific consensus about an objective reality. It is clear that most scientific claims are genuinely theoretical: Nether themselves observational nor derivable deductively from observation statements (nor from inductive generalizations thereof). Accepting that there are phenomena that we have more or less diet access to, then, theories seem, at least when taken literally, to tell us about what is going on ‘underneath’ the observable, directly accessible phenomena on order to produce those phenomena. The accounts given by such theories of this trans-empirical reality, simply because it is trans-empirical, can never be established by data, nor even by the ‘natural’ inductive generalizations of our data. No amount of evidence about tracks in cloud chambers and the like, can deductively establish that those tracks are produced by ‘trans-observational’ electrons.

One response would, of course, be to invoke some strict empiricist account of meaning, insisting that talk of electrons and the like, is, in fact just shorthand for talks in cloud chambers and the like. This account, however, has few, if any, current defenders. But, if so, the empiricist must acknowledge that, if we take any presently accepted theory, then there must be alternatives, different theories (indefinitely many of them) which treat the evidence equally well ~ assuming that the only evidential criterion is the entailment of the correct observational results.

All the same, there is an easy general result as well: assuming that a theory is any deductively closed set of sentences, and assuming, with the empiricist that the language in which these sentences are expressed has two sorts of predicated (observational and theoretical), and, finally, assuming that the entailment of the evidence is only constraint on empirical adequacy, then there are always indefinitely many different theories which are equally empirically adequate in a language in which the two sets of predicates are differentiated. Consider the restricts if ‘T’ to quantifier-free sentences expressed purely in the observational vocabulary, then any conservative extension of that restricted set of T’s consequences back into the full vocabulary is a ‘theory’ co-empirically adequate with ~ entailing the same singular observational statements as ~ ‘T’. Unless veery special conditions apply (conditions which do not apply to any real scientific theory), then some of the empirically equivalent theories will formally contradict ‘T’. (A similar straightforward demonstration works for the currently more fashionable account of theories as sets of models.)

How can an empiricist, who rejects the claim that two empirically equivalent theories are thereby fully equivalent, explain why the particular theory ‘T’ that is, as a matter of fact, accepted in science is preferred these other possible theories ‘T’, with the same observational content? Obviously the answer must be ‘by bringing in further criteria beyond that of simply having the right observational consequence. Simplicity, coherence with other accepted these and unity are favourite contenders. There are notorious problems in formulating this criteria at all precisely: But suppose, for present purposes, that we have a strong enough intuitive grasp to operate usefully with them. What is the status of such further criteria?

The empiricist-instrumentalist position, newly adopted and sharply argued by van Fraassen, is that those further criteria are ‘pragmatic’ ~ that is, involved essential reference to ourselves as ‘theory-users’. We happen tp prefer, for our own purposes, since, coherent, unified theories ~ but this is only a reflection of our preference es. It would be a mistake to think of those features supplying extra reasons to believe in the truth (or, approximate truth) of the theory that has them. Van Fraassen’s account differs from some standard instrumentalist-empiricist account in recognizing the extra content of a theory (beyond its directly observational content) as genuinely declarative, as consisting of true-or-false assertions about the hidden structure of the world. His account accepts that the extra content can neither be eliminated as a result of defining theoretical notions in observational terms, nor be properly regarded as only apparently declarative but in fact as simply a codification schemata. For van Fraassen, if a theory say that there are electrons, then the theory should be taken as meaning what it says ~ and this without any positivist divide debasing reinterpretations of the meaning that might make ‘There are electrons’ mere shorthand for some complicated set of statements about tracks in obscure chambers or the like.

In the case of contradictory but empirically equivalent theories, such as the theory T1 that ‘there are electrons’ and the theory T2 that ‘all the observable phenomena as if there are electrons but there are not ‘t’. Van Fraassen’s account entails that each has a truth-value, at most one of which is ‘true’, is that science need not to T2, but this need not mean that it is rational believe that it is more likely to be true (or otherwise appropriately connected with nature). So far as belief in the theory is belief but T2. The only belief involved in the acceptance of a theory is belief in the theorist’s empirical adequacy. To accept the quantum theory, for example, entails believing that it ‘saves the phenomena’ ~ all the (relevant) phenomena, but only the phenomena, theorists do ‘say more’ than can be checked empirically even in principle. What more they say may indeed be true, but acceptance of the theory does not involve belief in the truth of the ‘more’ that theorist say.

Preferences between theories that are empirically equivalent are accounted for, because acceptance involves more than belief: As well as this epistemic dimension, acceptance also has a pragmatic dimension. Simplicity, (relative) freedom from ads hoc assumptions, ‘unity’, and the like are genuine virtues that can supply good reasons to accept one theory than another, but they are pragmatic virtues, reflecting the way we happen to like to do science, rather than anything about the world. Simplicity to think that they do so: The rationality of science and of scientific practices can be in truth (or approximate truth) of accepted theories. Van Fraassen’s account conflicts with what many others see as very strong intuitions.

The most generally accepted account of this distinction is that a theory of justification is internalist if and only if it requires that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemologically justified for a given person to be cognitively accessible to that person, internal to his cognitive perceptive, and externalist, if it allows that, at least some of the justifying factors need not be thus accessible, so that they can be external to the believer’s cognitive perspective, beyond his knowingness. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalist and externalist theories of epistemic explication.

The externalism/internalism distinction has been mainly applied to theories of epistemic justification. It has also been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought content. The internalist requirement of cognitive accessibility can be interpreted in at least two ways: A strong version of internalism would require that the believer actually be aware of the justifying factors in order to be justified while a weaker version would require only that he be capable of becoming aware of them by focussing his attention appropriately. But without the need for any change of position, new information, and so forth. Though the phrase ‘cognitively accessible’ suggests the weak interpretation, therein intuitive motivation for intentionalism, viz., the idea that epistemic justification requires that the believer actually have in his cognitive possession a reason for thinking that the belief is true, wherefore, it would require the strong interpretation.

Perhaps the clearest example of an internalist position would be a ‘foundationalist’ view according to which foundational beliefs pertain to immediately experienced states of mind other beliefs are justified by standing in cognitively accessible logical or inferential relations to such foundational beliefs. Such a view could count as either a strong or a weak version of internalism, depending on whether actual awareness of the justifying elements or only the capacity to become aware of them is required. Similarly, a ‘coherentist’ view could also be internalist, if both the beliefs or other states with which a justification belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible.

It should be carefully noticed that when internalism is construed in this way, it is neither necessary nor sufficient by itself for internalism that the justifying factors literally be internal mental states of the person in question. Not necessarily, because on at least some views, e.g., a direct realist view of perception, something other than a mental state of the believer can be cognitively accessible: Not sufficient, because there are views according to which at least some mental states need not be actual (strong version) or even possible (weak versions) objects of objective awareness. Also, on this way of drawing the distinction, a hybrid view (like the ones already mentioned), according to which some of the factors required for justification must be cognitively accessible while others need not and in general will not be, would count as an externalist view. Obviously too, a view that was externalist in relation to a strong version of internalism (by not requiring that the believer actually be aware of all justifying factors) could still be internalist in relation to a weak version (by requiring that he at least be capable of becoming aware of them).

The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of ‘reliabilism’, whose main requirements for justification is roughly that the belief be produce d in a way or via a process that make it objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless, be epistemologically justified in accepting it. Thus, such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemological working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account on the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.

Two general lines of argument are commonly advanced in favour of justificatory externalism. The first starts from the allegedly common-sensical premise that knowledge can be un-problematically ascribed to relativity unsophisticated adults, to young children and even to higher animals. It is then argued that such ascriptions would be untenable on the standard internalist accounts of epistemic justification (assuming that epistemic justification is a necessary condition for knowledge), since the beliefs and inferences involved in such accounts are too complicated and sophisticated to be plausibly ascribed to such subjects. Thus, only an externalist view can make sense of such common-sense ascriptions and this, on the presumption that common-sense is correct, constitutes a strong argument in favour of externalism. An internalist may respond by externalism. An internalist may respond by challenging the initial premise, arguing that such ascriptions of knowledge are exaggerated, while perhaps at the same time claiming that the cognitive situation of at least some of the subjects in question. Is less restricted than the argument claims? A quite different response would be to reject the assumption that epistemic justification is a necessary condition for knowledge, perhaps, by adopting an externalist account of knowledge, rather than justification, as those aforementioned.

The second general line of argument for externalism points out that internalist views have conspicuously failed to provide defensible, non-sceptical solutions to the classical problems of epistemology. In striking contrast, however, such problems are in general easily solvable on an externalist view. Thus, if we assume both that the various relevant forms of scepticism are false and that the failure of internalist views so far is likely to be remedied in the future, we have good reason to think that some externalist view is true. Obviously the cogency of this argument depends on the plausibility of the two assumptions just noted. An internalist can reply, first, that it is not obvious that internalist epistemology is doomed to failure, that the explanation for the present lack of success may simply be the extreme difficulty of the problems in question. Secondly, it can be argued that most of even all of the appeal of the assumption that the various forms of scepticism are false depends essentially on the intuitive conviction that we do have reasons our grasp for thinking that the various beliefs questioned by the sceptic are true ~ a conviction that the proponent of this argument must of course reject.

The main objection to externalism rests on the intuition that the basic requirements for epistemic justification are that the acceptance of the belief in question be rational or responsible in relation to the cognitive goal of truth, which seems to require in turn that the believer actually be aware of a reason for thinking that the belief is true or at the very least, that such a reason be available to him. Since the satisfaction of a externalist condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of such a cognitively accessible reason. It is argued, externalism is mistaken as an account of epistemic justification . This general point has been elaborated by appeal to two sorts of putative intuitive counter-examples to externalism. The first of these challenges the necessity justification by appealing to examples of belief which seem intuitively to be justified, but for which the externalist conditions are not satisfied. The standard examples of this sort are cases where beliefs produced in some very non-standard way, e.g., by a Cartesian demon, but nonetheless, in such a way that the subjective experience of the believer is indistinguishable on that of someone whose beliefs are produced more normally. Cases of this general sort can be constructed in which any of the standard externalist condition, e.g., that the belief be a result of a reliable process, fail to be satisfied. The intuitive claim is that the believer in such a case is nonetheless, epistemically justified, inasmuch as one whose belief is produced in a more normal way, and hence that externalist accounts of justification must be mistaken.

Perhaps the most interesting reply to this sort of counter-example, on behalf of reliabilism specifically, holds that reliability of a cognitive process is to be assessed in ‘normal’ possible worlds, i.e., in possible worlds that are actually the way our world is common-scenically believed to be, rather than in the world which actually contains the belief being judged. Since the cognitive processes employed in the Cartesian demon case are, we may assume, reliable when assessed in this way, the reliabilist can agree that such beliefs are justified. The obvious further issue is whether or not there is an adequate rationale for this construal of reliabilism, so that the reply is not merely ad hoc.

The second, correlative way of elaborating the general objection to justificatory externalism challenges the sufficiency of the various externalist conditions by citing cases where those conditions are satisfied, but where the believers in question seem intuitively not to be justified. Here the most widely discussed examples have to do with possible occult cognitive capacities like clairvoyance. Considering the point in application once again to reliabilism specifically, the claim is that a reliable clairvoyant who has no reason to think that he has such a cognitive power, and perhaps even good reasons to the contrary, is not rational or responsible and hence, not epistemologically justified in accepting the belief that result from his clairvoyance, despite the fact that the reliabilist condition is satisfied.

One sort of response to this latter sort of objection is to ‘bite the bullet’ and insist that such believer e in fact justified, dismissing the seeming intuitions to the contrary as latent internalist prejudice. A more widely adopted response attempts to impose additional conditions, usually of a roughly internalist sort, which will rule out the offending example while still stopping far short of a full internalist . But while there is little doubt that such modified versions of externalism can indeed handle particular cases well enough to avoid clear intuitive implausibility, the issue is whether there will always be equally problematic cases that the cannot handle, and also whether there is any clear motivation for the additional requirements other than the general internalist view of justification that externalists are committed to reject.

A view in this same general vein, one that might be described as a hybrid of internalism and externalism, holding that epistemic justification requires that there be a justificatory facto r that is cognitively accessible e to the believer in question (though it need not be actually grasped), thus ruling out, e.g., a pure reliabilism. at the same time, however, though it must be objectively true that beliefs for which such a factor is available are likely to be true, this further fact need not be in any way grasped o r cognitive ly accessible to the believer. In effect, of the two premises needed to argue that a particular belief is likely to be true, one must be accessible in a way that would satisfy at least weak internalism, while the second can be (and normally will be) purely external. Here the internalist will respond that this hybrid view is of no help at all in meeting the objection that the belief is not held in the rational responsible way that justification intuitively seems required, for the believer in question, lacking one crucial premise, still has no reason at all for thinking that his belief is likely to be true.

An alternative to giving an externalist account of epistemic justification, one which may be more defensible while still accommodating many of the same motivating concerns, is to give an externalist account of knowledge directly, without relying on an intermediate account of justification. Such a view obviously have to reject the justified true belief account of knowledge, holding instead that knowledge is true belief which satisfies the chosen externalist condition, e.g., is a result of a reliable process (and, perhaps, further conditions as well). This makes it possible for such a view to retain an internalist account of epistemic justification, though the centrality of that concept is epistemology would obviously be seriously diminished.

Such an externalist account of knowledge can accommodate the common-sen conviction that animals, young children and unsophisticated adult’s posse’s knowledge, though not the weaker conviction (if such a conviction even exists) that such individuals are epistemically justified in their belief. It is also, least of mention, less vulnerable to internalist counter-examples of the sort and since the intuitions involved there pertain more clearly to justification than to knowledge. What is uncertain is what ultimate philosophical significance the resulting conception of knowledge is supposed to have. In particular, does it have any serious bearing on traditional epistemological problems and on the deepest and most troubling versions of scepticism, which seem in fact to be primarily concerned with justification rather than knowledge?

A rather different use of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ has to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined: According to an internalist view of content, the content of such intentional states depends only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individual’s mind or brain, and not at all on his physical and social environment: While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors. Here too a view that appeals to both internal and external elements is standardly classified as an externalist view.

As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist character. The main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, and so forth, that motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem at least to show that the belief or thought content that can e properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment -, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatory criteria employed by the experts in his social group, and so forth. ~ not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.

An objection to externalist accounts of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent of external factors pertaining to the environment, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of the these factors ~ which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.

The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist account of justification in the following way: If part of all of the content of a belief inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to the content and the status of that content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist must insist that there are no rustication relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justify anything else: By such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to shows that the externalists account of content is mistaken.

To have a word or a picture, or any other object in one’s mind seems to be one thing, but to understand it is quite another. A major target of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is the suggestion that this understanding is achieved by a further presence, so that words might be understood if they are accompanied by ideas, for example. Wittgenstein insists that the extra presence merely raises the same kind of problem again. The better of suggestions in that understanding is to be thought of as possession of a technique, or skill, and this is the point of the slogan that ‘meaning is use’, the idea is congenital to ‘pragmatism’ and hostile to ineffable and incommunicable understandings.

Whatever it is that makes, what would otherwise be mere sounds and inscriptions into instruments of communication and understanding. The philosophical problem is to demystify this power, and to relate it to what wee know of ourselves and the world. Contributions to this study include the theory of speech acts and the investigation of commonisation and the relationship between words and ideas, sand words and the world.

The most influential idea I e theory of meaning I the past hundred years is the thesis that the meaning of an indicative sentence is given by its truth-condition. On this conception, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions. The conception was first clearly formulated by the German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics Gottlob Frége (1848-1925), then was developed in a distinctive way by the early Wittgenstein, and is as leading idea of the American philosopher Donald Herbert Davidson. (1917-2003). The conception has remained so central that those who offer opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it.

The conception of meaning as truth-conditions need not and should not be advanced for being in itself a complete account of meaning. For instance, one who understands a language must have some idea of the range of speech acts conventionally performed by the various types of sentences in the language, and must have some ideate significance of speech act, the claim of the theorist of truth-conditions should rather be targeted on the notion of content: If two indicative sentences differ in what they strictly and literally say, then this difference is fully accounted for by the difference in their truth-conditions. It is this claim and its attendant problems, which will be the concern of each in the following.

The meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituents. This is indeed just a statement of what it is for an expression to be semantically complex. It is one of the initial attractions of the conception of meaning as truth-conditions that it permits a smooth and satisfying account of the way in which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning its constituents. On the truth-conditional conception, to give the meaning of sn expressions is the contribution it makes to the truth-conditions of sentence in which it occur. For example terms ~ proper names, indexical, and certain pronouns ~ this is done by stating the reference of the term in question. For predicates, it is done either by stating the conditions under which the predicate is true of arbitrary objects, or by stating the conditions under which arbitrary atomic sentences containing it true. The meaning of a sentence-forming operators as given by stating its contribution to the truth-conditions of a complex sentence, as function of the semantic values of the sentence on which it operates. For an extremely simple, but nevertheless structured language, er can state that contribution’s various expressions make to truth condition, are such as:

A1: The referent of ‘London ‘ is London.

A2: The referent of ‘Paris’ is Paris

A3: Any sentence of the form ‘a is beautiful’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘a’ is beautiful.

A4: Any sentence of the form ‘a is lager than b’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘a’ is larger than referent of ‘b’.

A5: Any sentence of t he for m ‘its no t the case that ‘A’ is true if and only if it is not the case that ‘A’ is true .

A6: Any sentence of the form ‘A and B’ is true if and only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true.

The principle’s A1-A6 form a simple theory of truth for a fragment of English. In this the or it is possible to derive these consequences: That ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true if and only if Paris is beautiful, is true and only if Paris is beautiful (from A2 and A3): That ‘London is larger than Paris and it is not the case that London is beautiful, is true if and only if London is larger than Paris and it is not the case that London is beautiful (from A1-A5), and in general, for any sentence ‘A’, this simple language we can derive something of the form ‘A’ is true if and only if ‘A’ .

Yet, theorist of truth conditions should insist that not ever y true statement about the reference o f an expression is fit to be an axiom in a meaning-giving theory of truth for a language. The axiom‘London’ refers to the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666.

This is a true statement about the reference of ‘London’. It is a consequence of a theory which substitute’s tis axiom for A1 in our simple truth theory that ‘London is beautiful’ is true if and only if the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666 is beautiful. Since a subject can understand thee name ‘London; without knowing that the last-mentioned truth condition, this replacement axiom is not fit to be an axiom in a meaning-specifying truth theory. It is, of course, incumbent on a theorist of meaning as truth conditions to state the constraints on the acceptability of axioms in a way which does not presuppose any prior, truth-conditional conception of meaning.

Among the many challenges facing the theorist of truth conditions, two are particularly salient and fundamental, first, the theorist has to answer the charge of triviality or vacuity. Second, the theorist must offer an account of what it is fir a person’s language to truly describable by a semantic theory containing a given semantic axiom.

What can take the charge of triviality first? In more detail, it would run thus: since the content of a claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true amounts to no more than the claim that Paris is beautiful, we can trivially describe understanding a sentence, if we wish, as knowing its truth-conditions. But this gives us no substantive account of understanding whatsoever. Something other than grasp of truth conditions must provide the substantive account. The charge tests upon what has been called the ‘redundancy theory of truth’, the theory also known as ‘minimalism’. Or the ‘deflationary’ view of truth, fathered by the German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics, had begun with Gottlob Frége (1848-1925), and the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Plumton Frank Ramsey (1903-30). Wherefore, the essential claim is that the predicate’ . . . is true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophical enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, nit centres on the points that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’(hence redundancy): That in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’. Or ‘all logical consequences are true’. The predicate functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said or the kind’s of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example: ‘(∀p, q)(p & p ➞ q ➞ q)’ where there is no use of a notion of truth.

There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive users of the notion, such as ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a normative governing discourse’. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objectivity’ conception of truth. But, perhaps, we can have the norm even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed without mention of truth: Science wants it to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, then ‘p’, discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’ when

not-p.

It is, nonetheless, that we can take charge of triviality, since the content of a claim ht the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true, amounting to no more than the claim that Paris is beautiful, we can trivially describe understanding a sentence. If we wish, as knowing its truth-condition, but this gives us no substitute account of understanding whatsoever. Something other than grasp of truth conditions must provide the substantive account. The charge rests on or upon what has been the redundancy theory of truth. The minimal theory states that the concept of truth is exhaustively by the fact that it conforms to the equivalence principle, the principle that for any proposition ‘p’, it is true that ‘p’ if and only if ‘p’. Many different philosophical theories, accept that e equivalence principle, as e distinguishing feature of the minimal theory, its claim that the equivalence principle exhausts the notion of truth. It is, however, widely accepted, both by opponents and supporters of truth conditional theories of meaning, that it is inconsistent to accept both the minimal theory of truth and a truth conditional account of meaning. If the claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful, it is circular to try to explain the sentence’s meaning in terms of its truth condition. The minimal theory of truth has been endorsed by Ramsey, Ayer, and later Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson, Horwich and ~ confusingly and inconsistently of Frége himself.

The minimal theory treats instances of the equivalence principle as definitional truth for a given sentence. But in fact, it seems that each instance of the equivalence principle can itself be explained. The truths from which such an instance as:

‘London is beautiful’ is true if and only if

London is beautiful

can be explained are precisely A1 and A3 in that, this would be a pseudo-explanation if the fact that ‘London’ refers to London consists in part in the fact that ‘London is beautiful’ has the truth-condition it does? But that is very implausible: It is, after all, possible to understand the name ‘London’ without understanding the predicate ‘is beautiful’. The idea that facts about the reference of particular words can be explanatory of facts about the truth conditions of sentences containing them in no way requires any naturalistic or any other kind of reduction of the notion of reference. Nor is the idea incompatible with the plausible point that singular reference can be attributed at all only to something which is capable of combining with other expressions to form complete sentences. That still leaves room for facts about an expression’s having the particular reference it does to be partially explanatory of the particular truth condition possessed by a given sentence containing it. The minimal theory thus treats as definitional or stimulative something which is in fact open to explanation. What makes this explanation possible is that there is a general notion of truth which has, among the many links which hold it in place, systematic connections with the semantic values of subsentential expressions.

A second problem with the minimal theory is that it seems impossible to formulate it without at some point relying implicitly on features and principles involving truth which go beyond anything countenanced by the minimal theory. If the minimal theory treats truth as a predicate of anything linguistic, be it utterances, type-in-a-language, or whatever. Then the equivalence schemata will not cover all cases, but only those in the theorist’s own language. Some account has to be given of truth for sentences of other languages. Speaking of the truth of language-independent propositions or thoughts will only post-pone, not avoid, this issue, since at some point principles have to be stated associating these language-dependent entities with sentences of particular languages. The defender of the minimalist theory is that the sentence ‘S’ of a foreign language is best translated by our sentence, then the foreign sentence ‘S’ is true if and only if ‘p’. Now the best translation of a sentence must preserve the concepts expressed in the sentence. Constraints involving a general notion of truth are pervasive plausible philosophical theory of concepts. It is, for example, a condition of adequacy on an individuating account of any concept that there exist what may be called a ‘Determination Theory’ for that account ~ that is, a specification on how the account contributes to fixing the semantic value of that concept. The notion of a concept’s semantic value is the notion of something which makes a certain contribution to the truth conditions of thoughts in which the concept occurs. But this is to presuppose, than to elucidate, a general notion of truth.

It is, also, plausible that there are general constraints on the form of such Determination Theories, constrains which involve truth and which are not derivable from the minimalist ‘s conception. Suppose that concepts are individuated by their possession condition. A possession condition may in various ways make a thinker’s possession of a particular concept dependent upon his relation to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between accept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world as being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation to what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to the subject’s environment. If this is so, to mention of such experiences in a possession condition dependent in part upon the environmental relations of the thinker. Evan though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary in the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition which properly individuates such a concept must take into account the thinker’s social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.

Its alternative approach, addresses the question by starting from the idea that a concept is individuated by the condition which must be satisfied a thinker is to posses that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other altitudes whose content contain it as a constituent. So, to take a simple case, one could propose that the logical concept ‘and’ is individualized by this condition: It is the unique concept ‘C’ to posses which a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basting them on any further inference or information: From any two premises ‘A’ and ‘B’, ACB can be inferred and from any premise s a relatively observational concepts such as; round’ can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker finds specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are not based on perception to those judgements that are. A statement which individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to posses it can be described as giving the possession condition for the concept.

A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for ‘and’ doers not. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experience which have to be mentioned in the possession conditions for relatively observational; concepts. What we must avoid is mention of the concept in question as such within the content of the attitude attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposed possession of the concept in an account which was meant to elucidate its possession. In talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That a thinker’s mastery of a concept is inextricably tied to how he finds it natural to go in new cases in applying the concept.

Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering of the others. Two of the families which plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of same simple concepts 0, 1. 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers, ‘there are o so-and-so’s, there is 1 so-and- so’s, . . . and the family consisting of the concepts ‘belief’ and ‘desire’. Such families have come to be known as ‘local holist’s’. A local holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demand that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form, belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for a thinker to posses them is to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For those other possession conditions to individuate properly. It is necessary that there be some ranking of the concepts treated. The possession condition or concepts higher in the ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower levels in the ranking.

A possession condition may in various ways make a thinker’s possession of a particular concept dependent on or upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world as being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to te subject’s environment. If this is so, then mention of such experiences in a possession condition will make possession f that concept relations tn the thicker. Burge (1979) has also argued from intuitions about particular examples that even though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary in the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition which properly individuates such a concept must take into account the thinker’s social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.

Once, again, some general principles involving truth can, as Horwich has emphasized, be derived from the equivalence schemata using minimal logical apparatus. Consider, for instance, the principle that ‘Paris is beautiful and London is beautiful’ is true if and only if ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true and ‘London is beautiful’ is true if and only if Paris is beautiful and London is beautiful. But no logical manipulations of the equivalence e schemata will allow the derivation of that general constraint governing possession condition, truth and assignment of semantic values. That constraints can of course be regarded as a further elaboration of the idea that truth is one of the aims of judgement.

What is to a greater extent, but to consider the other question, for ‘What is it for a person’s language to be correctly describable by a semantic theory containing a particular axiom, such as the above axiom A6 for conjunctions? This question may be addressed at two depths of generality. A shallower of levels, in this question may take for granted the person’s possession of the concept of conjunction, and be concerned with what hast be true for the axiom to correctly describe his language. At a deeper level, an answer should not sidestep the issue of what it is to posses the concept. The answers to both questions are of great interest.

When a person means conjunction by ‘and’, he is not necessarily capable of formulating the axiom A6 explicitly. Even if he can formulate it, his ability to formulate it is not causal basis of his capacity to hear sentences containing the word ‘and’ as meaning something involving conjunction. Nor is it the causal basis of his capacity to mean something involving conjunction by sentences he utters containing the word ‘and’. Is it then right to regard a truth theory as part of an unconscious psychological computation, and to regard understanding a sentence as involving a particular way of deriving a theorem from a truth theory at some level of unconscious processing? One problem with this is that it is quite implausible that everyone who speaks exactly the same language has to use exactly the same algorithms for computing the meaning of a sentence. In the past thirteen years, the particular work as befitting Davies and Evans, whereby a conception has evolved according to which an axiom like A6, is true of a person’s component in the explanation of his understanding of each sentence containing the words ‘and’, a common component which explains why each such sentence is understood as meaning something involving conjunction. This conception can also be elaborated in computational; terms: As alike to the axiom A6 to be true of a person’s language is for the unconscious mechanism, which produce understanding to draw on the information that a sentence of the form ‘A and B’ is true only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true. Many different algorithms may equally draw on or open this information. The psychological reality of a semantic theory thus are to involve, Marr’s (1982) given by classification as something intermediate between his level one, the function computed, and his level two, the algorithm by which it is computed. This conception of the psychological reality of a semantic theory can also be applied to syntactic and phonological theories. Theories in semantics, syntax and phonology are not themselves required to specify the particular algorithm which the language user employs. The identification of the particular computational methods employed is a task for psychology. But semantic, syntactic and phonological theories are answerable to psychological data, and are potentially refutable by them ~ for these linguistic theories do make commitments to the information drawn on or upon by mechanisms in the language user.

This answer to the question of what it is for an axiom to be true of a person’s language clearly takes for granted the person’s possession of the concept expressed by the word treated by the axiom. In the example of the axiom A6, the information drawn upon is that sentences of the form ‘A and B’ are true if and only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true. This informational content employs, as it has to if it is to be adequate, the concept of conjunction used in stating the meaning of sentences containing ‘and’. S he computational answer we have returned needs further elaboration, which does not want to take for granted possession of the concepts expressed in the language. It is at this point that the theory of linguistic understanding has to argue that it has to draw upon a theory if the conditions for possessing a given concept. It is plausible that the concept of conjunction is individuated by the following condition for a thinker to have possession of it:

The concept ‘and’ is that concept ‘C’ to possess which a

thinker must meet the following conditions: He finds inferences

of the following forms compelling, does not find them

compelling as a result of any reasoning and finds them

compelling because they are of there forms:



pCq pCq PQ

p q PCq



Here ‘p’ and ‘q’ range over complete propositional thoughts, not sentences. When axiom A6 is true of a person’s language, there is a global dovetailing between this possessional condition for the concept of conjunction and certain of his practices involving the word ‘and’. For the case of conjunction, the dovetailing involves at least this:

If the possession condition for conjunction entails that the

thinker who possesses the concept of conjunction must be

willing to make certain transitions involving the thought p&q,

and of the thinker’s semitrance ‘A’ means that ‘p’ and his

sentence ‘B’ means that ‘q’ then: The thinker must be willing

to make the corresponding linguistic transition involving

sentence ‘A and B’.

This is only part of what is involved in the required dovetailing. Given what wee have already said about the uniform explanation of the understanding of the various occurrences of a given word, we should also add, that there is a uniform (unconscious, computational) explanation of the language user’s willingness to make the corresponding transitions involving the sentence ‘A and B’.

This dovetailing account returns an answer to the deeper questions because neither the possession condition for conjunction, nor the dovetailing condition which builds upon the dovetailing condition which builds on or upon that possession condition, takes for granted the thinker’s possession of the concept expressed by ‘and’. The dovetailing account for conjunction is an instance of a more general; schemata, which can be applied to any concept. The case of conjunction is of course, exceptionally simple in several respects. Possession conditions for other concepts will speak not just of inferential transitions, but of certain conditions in which beliefs involving the concept in question are accepted or rejected, and the corresponding dovetailing condition will inherit these features. This dovetailing account has also to be underpinned by a general rationale linking contributions to truth conditions with the particular possession condition proposed for concepts. It is part of the task of the theory of concepts to supply this in developing Determination Theories for particular concepts.

In some cases, a relatively clear account is possible of how a concept can feature in thoughts which may be true though unverifiable. The possession condition for the quantificational concept all natural numbers can in outline run thus: This quantifier is that concept Cx . . . x . . . to posses which the thinker has to find any inference of the form



CxFx



Fn



Compelling, where ‘n’ is a concept of a natural number, and does not have to find anything else essentially containing Cx . . . x . . . compelling. The straightforward Determination Theory for this possession condition is one on which the truth of such a thought CxFx is true only if all natural numbers are ‘F’. That all natural numbers are ‘F’ is a condition which can hold without our being able to establish that it holds. So an axiom of a truth theory which dovetails with this possession condition for universal quantification over the natural numbers will b component of a realistic, non-verifications theory of truth conditions.

Finally, this response to the deeper questions allows us to answer two challenges to the conception of meaning as truth-conditions. First, there was the question left hanging earlier, of how the theorist of truth-conditions is to say what makes one axiom of a semantic theory correct rather than another, when the two axioms assigned the same semantic values, but do so by different concepts. Since the different concepts will have different possession conditions, the dovetailing accounts, at the deeper level, of what it is for each axiom to be correct for a person’s language will be different accounts. Second, there is a challenge repeatedly made by the minimalist theories of truth, to the effect that the theorist of meaning as truth-conditions should give some non-circular account of what it is to understand a sentence, or to be capable of understanding all sentences containing a given constituent. For each expression in a sentence, the corresponding dovetailing account, together with the possession condition, supplies a non-circular account of what it is to that expression. The combined accounts for each of the expressions which comprise a given sentence together constitute a non-circular account of what it is to understand the complete sentence. Taken together, they allow theorist of meaning as truth-conditions fully to meet the challenge.

A widely discussed idea is that for a subject to be in a certain set of content-involving states, for attribution of those state s to make the subject as rationally intelligible. Perceptions make it rational for a person to form corresponding beliefs. Beliefs make it rational to draw certain inference s. belief and desire make rational the formation of particular intentions, and the performance e of the appropriate actions. People are frequently irrational of course, bu t a governing ideal of this approach is that for any family of contents, there is some minimal core of rational transitions to or from states involving them, a core that a person must respect of his states are to be attributed with those contents at all. We contrast what we wan do with what we must do ~ whether for reasons of morality or duty, or even for reasons of practical necessity (to get what we wanted in the first place). Accordingly, our own desires have seemed to be the principal actions that most fully express our own individual natures and will, and those for which we are personally most responsible. But desire has also seemed t o be a principle of action contrary to and at war with our better natures, as rational and or agents. For it is principally from our own differing perspectives upon what would be good, that each of us wants what he does, each point of view being defined by one’s own interests and pleasure. In this, the representations of desire are like those of sensory perception, similarly shaped by the perspective of the perceiver and the idiosyncrasies of the perceptual dialectic about desire and its object recapitulates that of perception ad sensible qualities. The strength of desire, for instance, varies with the state of the subject more or less independently of the character, an the actual utility, of the object wanted. Such facts cast doubt on the ‘objectivity’ of desire, and on the existence of a correlatives property of ‘goodness’, inherent in the objects of our desires, and independent of them. Perhaps, as the Dutch Jewish rationalist (1632-77) Benedictus de Spinoza put it, it is not that we want what we think good, but that we think good what we happen to want ~ the ‘good’ in what we want being a mere shadow cast by the desire for it. (There is a parallel Protagorean view of belief, similar ly sceptical of truth). The serious defence of such a view, however, would require a systematic reduction of apparent facts about goodness to fats about desire, and an analysis of desire which in turn makes no reference to goodness. While what is yet to be provided, moral psychologists have sought to vindicate an idea of objective goodness. For example, as what would be good from all points of view, or none, or, in the manner of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, to establish another principle (the will or practical reason) conceived as an autonomous source of action, independent of desire or its object: And this tradition has tended to minimize the role of desire in the genesis of action.

Ascribing states with content on actual person has to proceed simultaneously with attributions of as wide range of non-rational states and capacities. In general, we cannot understand a persons reasons for acting as he does without knowing the array of emotions and sensations to which he is subject: What he remembers and what he forgets, and how he reasons beyond the confines to minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which play a fundamental role in individuating content, cannot be understood purely in terms relating to minimal rationality. A perception of the world as being a certain way is not (and could not be) under a subject’s rational control. Thought it is true and important that perceptions give reason for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reasons ~ observational beliefs about the environment ~ have contents which can only be elucidated by referring back to perceptual experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states differ from beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning what they provide reasons for judging or doing: or frequently these latter judgements and actions can be individuated without reference back to the states that provide for them.

What is the significance for theories of content of the fact that it is almost certainly adaptive for members of as species to have a system of states with representational contents which are capable of influencing their actions appropriately? According to teleological theories a content, a constitutive account of content ~ one which says what it is for a state to have a given content ~ must make user of the notion of natural function and teleology. The intuitive idea is that for a belief state to have a given content ‘p’ is for the belief-forming mechanisms which produced it to have the unction as, perhaps, the derivatively of producing that stare only when it is the case that ‘p’. One issue this approach must tackle is whether it is really capable of associating with states the classical, realistic, verification-transcendent contents which, pre-theoretically, we attribute to them. It is not clear that a content’s holding unknowably can influence the replication of belief-forming mechanisms. But if content itself proves to resist elucidation, it is still a very natural function and selection. It is still a very attractive view that selection, it is still a very attractive view, that selection must be mentioned in an account of what associates something ~ such as a sentence ~ with a particular content, even though that content itself may be individuated by other means.

Contents are normally specified by ‘that . . .’ clauses, and it is natural to suppose that a content has the same kind of sequence and hierarchical structure as the sentence that specifies it. This supposition would be widely accepted for conceptual content. It is, however, a substantive thesis that all content is conceptual. One way of treating one sort of ‘perceptual content’ is to regard the content as determined by a spatial type, the type under which the region of space around the perceiver must fall if the experience with that content is to represent the environment correctly. The type involves a specification of surfaces and features in the environment, and their distances and directions from the perceiver’s body as origin, such contents lack any sentence-like structure at all. Supporters of the view that all content is conceptual will argue that the legitimacy of using these spatial types in giving the content of experience does not undermine the thesis that all content is conceptual. Such supporters will say that the spatial type is just a way of capturing what can equally be captured by conceptual components such as ‘that distance’, or ‘that direction’, where these demonstratives are made available by the perception in question. Friends of conceptual content will respond that these demonstratives themselves cannot be elucidated without mentioning the spatial type which lack sentence-like structure.

Content-involving states are actions individuated in party reference to the agent’s relations to things and properties in his environment. Wanting to see a particular movie and believing that the building over there is a cinema showing it makes rational the action of walking in the direction of that building.

However, in the general philosophy of mind, and more recently, desire has received new attention from those who understand mental states in terms of their causal or functional role in their determination of rational behaviour, and in particular from philosophers trying to understand the semantic content or intentional; character of mental states in those terms as ‘functionalism’, which attributes for the functionalist who thinks of mental states and evens asa causally mediating between a subject’s sensory inputs and that subject’s ensuing behaviour. Functionalism itself is the stronger doctrine that makes a mental state the type of state it is ~ in pain, a smell of violets, a belief that the koala (an arboreal Australian marsupial (Phascolarctos cinereus), is dangerous ~ is the functional relation it bears to the subject’s perceptual stimuli, behavioural responses, and other mental states.

In the general philosophy of mind, and more recently, desire has received new attention from those who would understand mental stat n terms of their causal or functional role in the determination of rational behaviour, and in particularly from philosophers trying to understand the semantic content or the intentionality of mental states in those terms.

Conceptual (sometimes computational, cognitive, causal or functional) role semantics (CRS) entered philosophy through the philosophy of language, not the philosophy of mind. The core idea behind the conceptual role of semantics in the philosophy of language is that the way linguistic expressions are related to one another determines what the expressions in the language mean. There is a considerable affinity between the conceptual role of semantics and structuralist semiotics that has been influence in linguistics. According to the latter, languages are to be viewed as systems of differences: The basic idea is that the semantic force (or, ‘value’) of an utterance is determined by its position in the space of possibilities that one’ language offers. Conceptual role semantics also has affinities with what the artificial intelligence researchers call ‘procedural semantics’, the essential idea here is that providing a compiler for a language is equivalent to specifying a semantic theory of procedures that a computer is instructed to execute by a program.

Nevertheless, according to the conceptual role of semantics, the meaning of a thought I determined by the though’s role in a system of states, to specify a thought is not to specify its truth or referential condition, but to specify its role. Walter’s and twin-Walter’s thoughts, though different truth and referential conditions, share the same conceptual role, and it is by virtue of this commonality that they behave type-identically. If Water and twin-Walter each has a belief that he would express by ‘water quenches thirst’ the conceptual role of semantics can explained predict their dripping their cans into H2O and XYZ respectfully. Thus the conceptual role of semantics would seem, though not to Jerry Fodor, who rejects of the conceptual role of semantics for both external and internal problems.

Nonetheless, if, as Fodor contents, thoughts have recombinable linguistic ingredients, then, of course, for the conceptual role of semantic theorist, questions arise about the role of expressions in the language of thought as well as in the public language we speak and write. And, according, the conceptual role of semantic theorbists divide not only over their aim, but also about conceptual roles in semantic’s proper domain. Two questions avail themselves. Some hold that public meaning is somehow derivative (or inherited) from an internal mental language (mentalese) and that a mentalese expression has autonomous meaning (partly). So, for example, the inscriptions on this page require for their understanding translation, or at least, transliterations. Into the language of thought: representations in the brain require no such translation or transliteration. Others hold that the language of thought just is public language internalized and that it is expressions (or primary) meaning in virtue of their conceptual role.

After one decides upon the aims and the proper province of the conceptual role for semantics, the relations among expressions ~ public or mental ~ constitute their conceptual roles. Because most conceptual roles of semantics as theorists leave the notion of the role in conceptuality as a blank cheque, the options are open-ended. The conceptual role of a [mental] expression might be its causal association: Any disposition to token or example, utter or think on the expression ‘ℯ’ when tokening another ‘ℯ’ or ‘a’ an ordered n-tuple < ℯ’ ℯ’‘, . . . >, or vice versa, can count as the conceptual role of ‘ℯ’. A more common option is characterized conceptual role not causally but inferentially (these need compatible, contingent upon one’s attitude about the naturalization of inference): The conceptual role of an expression ‘ℯ’ in ‘L’ might consist of the set of actual and potential inferences from ‘ℯ’, or, as a more common, the ordered pair consisting of these two sets. Or, if it is sentences which have non-derived inferential roles, what would it mean to talk of the inferential role of words? Some have found it natural to think of the inferential role of as words, as represented by the set of inferential roles of the sentence in which the word appears.

The expectation of expecting that one sort of thing could serve all these tasks went hand in hand with what has come to be called the ‘Classical View’ of concepts, according to which they had an ‘analysis’ consisting of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for their satisfaction, which are known to any competent user of them. The standard example is the especially simple one of [bachelor], which seems to be identical to [eligible unmarried male]. A more interesting, but analysis was traditionally thought to be [justified true belief].

This Classical View seems to offer an illuminating answer to a certain form of metaphysical question: In virtue of what is something the kind of thing it is ~ i.e., in virtue of what is a bachelor a bachelor? ~ and it does so in a way that supports counter-factual: It tells us what would satisfy the conception situations other than the actual ones (although all actual bachelors might turn out to be freckled, its possible that there might be unfreckled ones, since the analysis does not exclude that). The view also seems to offer an answer to an epistemological question of how people seem to know a priori (or independently of experience) about the nature of many things, e.g., that bachelors are unmarried: It is constitutive of the competency (or possession) conditions of a concept that they know its analysis, at least on reflection.

The Classic View, however, has alway ss had to face the difficulty of primitive concepts: Its all well and good to claim that competence consists in some sort of mastery of a definition, but what about the primitive concept in which a process of definition mus t ultimately end: Here the British Empiricism of the seventeenth century began to offer a solution: All the primitives were sensory, indeed, they expanded the Classical View to include the claim, now often taken uncritically for granted in the discussions of that view, that all concepts are ‘derived from experience’:’Every idea is derived from a corresponding impression’, in the work of Walter Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-76) were often thought to mean that concepts were somehow composed of introspectible mental items ~ ‘images’, ‘impressions’ ~ that were ultimately decomposable into basic sensory parts. Thus, Hume analysed the concept of [material object] as involving certain regularities in our sensory experience and [cause] as involving spatio-temporal contiguity ad constant conjunction.

The Irish ‘idealist’ George Berkeley, noticed a problem with this approach that every generation has had to rediscover: If a concept is a sensory impression, like an image, then how does one distinguish a general concept [triangle] from a more particular one ~ say, [isosceles triangle] ~ that would serve in imagining the general one. More recently, Wittgenstein (1953) called attention to the multiple ambiguity of images. And in any case, images seem quite hopeless for capturing the concepts associated with logical terms (what is the image for negation or possibility?) What ever the role of such representation, full conceptual competency must involve something more.

Conscionably, in addition to images and impressions and other sensory items, a full account of concepts needs to consider is of logical structure. This is precisely what the logical positivist did, focussing on logically structured sentences instead of sensations and images, transforming the empiricist claim into the famous ‘Verifiability Theory of Meaning’, the meaning of s sentence is the means by which it is confirmed or refuted, ultimately by sensory experience the meaning or concept associated with a predicate is the means by which people confirm or refute whether something satisfies it.

This once-popular position has come under much attack in philosophy in the last fifty years, in the first place, few, if any, successful ‘reductions’ of ordinary concepts (like [material objects] [cause] to purely sensory concepts have ever been achieved. Our concept of material object and causation seem to go far beyond mere sensory experience, just as our concepts in a highly theoretical science seem to go far beyond the often only meagre evidence we can adduce for them.

The American philosopher of mind Jerry Alan Fodor and LePore (1992) have recently argued that the arguments for meaning holism are, however less than compelling, and that there are important theoretical reasons for holding out for an entirely atomistic account of concepts. On this view, concepts have no ‘analyses’ whatsoever: They are simply ways in which people are directly related to individual properties in the world, which might obtain for someone, for one concept but not for any other: In principle, someone might have the concept [bachelor] and no other concepts at all, much less any ‘analysis’ of it. Such a view goes hand in hand with Fodor’s rejection of not only verificationist, but any empiricist account of concept learning and construction: Given the failure of empiricist construction. Fodor (1975, 1979) notoriously argued that concepts are not constructed or ‘derived’ from experience at all, but are and nearly enough as they are all innate.

The deliberating considerations about whether there are innate ideas is much as it is old, it, nonetheless, takes from Plato (429-347 Bc) in the ‘Meno’ the problems to which the doctrine of ‘anamnesis’ is an answer in Plato’s dialogue. If we do not understand something, then we cannot set about learning it, since we do not know enough to know how to begin. Teachers also come across the problem in the shape of students, who can not understand why their work deserves lower marks than that of others. The worry is echoed in philosophies of language that see the infant as a ‘little linguist’, having to translate their environmental surroundings and grasp on or upon the upcoming language. The language of thought hypothesis was especially associated with Fodor that mental processing occurs in a language different from one’s ordinary native language, but underlying and explaining our competence with it. The idea is a development of the Chomskyan notion of an innate universal grammar. It is a way of drawing the analogy between the workings of the brain or mind and those of the standard computer, since computer programs are linguistically complex sets of instruments whose execution explains the surface behaviour of computer. As an explanation of ordinary language has not found universal favour. It apparently only explains ordinary representational powers by invoking innate things of the same sort, and it invites the image of the learning infant translating the language whose own powers are a mysterious a biological given.

René Descartes (1596-1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), defended the view that mind contains innate ideas: Berkeley, Hume and Locke attacked it. In fact, as we now conceive the great debate between European Rationalism and British Empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the doctrine of innate ideas is a central bone of contention: Rationalist typically claim that knowledge is impossible without a significant stoke of general innate concepts or judgements: Empiricist argued that all ideas are acquired from experience. This debate is replayed with more empirical content and with considerably greater conceptual complexity in contemporary cognitive science, most particularly within the domain of psycholinguistic theory and cognitive developmental theory.

Some of the philosophers may be cognitive scientist other’s concern themselves with the philosophy of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Since the inauguration of cognitive science these disciplines have attracted much attention from certain philosophes of mind. The attitudes of these philosophers and their reception by psychologists vary considerably. Many cognitive psychologists have little interest in philosophical issues. Cognitive scientists are, in general, more receptive.

Fodor, because of his early involvement in sentence processing research, is taken seriously by many psycholinguists. His modularity thesis is directly relevant to question about the interplay of different types of knowledge in language understanding. His innateness hypothesis, however, is generally regarded as unhelpful,. And his prescription that cognitive psychology is primarily about propositional attitudes is widely ignored. The American philosopher of mind, Daniel Clement Dennett (1942- )whose recent work on consciousness treats a topic that is highly controversial, but his detailed discussion of psychological research finding has enhanced his credibility among psychologists. In general, however, psychologists are happy to get on with their work without philosophers telling them about their ‘mistakes’.

Connectionmism has provided a somewhat different reaction mg philosophers. Some ~ mainly those who, for other reasons, were disenchanted with traditional artificial intelligence research ~ have welcomed this new approach to understanding brain and behaviour. They have used the success, apparently or otherwise, of connectionist research, to bolster their arguments for a particular approach to explaining behaviour. Whether this neuro-philosophy will eventually be widely accepted is a different question. One of its main dangers is succumbing to a form of reductionism that most cognitive scientists and many philosophers of mind, find incoherent.

One must be careful not to caricature the debate. It is too easy to see the debate as one pitting innatists, who argue that all concepts of all of linguistic knowledge is innate (and certain remarks of Fodor and of Chomsky lead themselves in this interpretation) against empiricist who argue that there is no innate cognitive structure in which one need appeal in explaining the acquisition of language or the facts of cognitive development (an extreme reading of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam 1926-). But this debate would be a silly and a sterile debate indeed. For obviously, something is innate. Brains are innate. And the structure of the brain must constrain the nature of cognitive and linguistic development to some degree. Equally obvious, something is learned and is learned as opposed to merely grown as limbs or hair growth. For not all of the world’s citizens end up speaking English, or knowing the Relativity Theory. The interesting questions then all concern exactly what is innate, to what degree it counts as knowledge, and what is learned and to what degree its content and structure are determined by innately specified cognitive structure. And that is plenty to debate about.

The arena in which the innateness takes place has been prosecuted with the greatest vigour is that of language acquisition, and it is an appropriate to begin there. But it will be extended to the domain of general knowledge and reasoning abilities through the investigation of the development of object constancy ~ the disposition to concept of physical objects as persistent when unobserved and to reason about there properties locations when they are not perceptible.

The most prominent exponent of the innateness hypothesis in the domain of language acquisition is Chomsky (1296, 1975). His research and that of his colleagues and students is responsible for developing the influence and powerful framework of transformational grammar that dominates current linguistic and psycholinguistic theory. This body of research has amply demonstrated that the grammar of any human language is a highly systematic, abstract structure and that there are certain basic structural features shared by the grammars of all human language s, collectively called ‘universal grammar’. Variations among the specific grammars of the world’s ln languages can be seen as reflecting different settings of a small number of parameters that can, within the constraints of universal grammar, take may of several different valued. All of type principal arguments for the innateness hypothesis in linguistic theory on this central insight about grammars. The principal arguments are these: (1) The argument from the existence of linguistic universals, (2) the argument from patterns of grammatical errors in early language learners: (3) The poverty of the stimulus argument, (4) the argument from the case of fist language learning (5) the argument from the relative independence of language learning and general intelligence, and (6) The argument from the moduarity of linguistic processing.

Innatists argue (Chomsky 1966, 1975) that the very presence of linguistic universals argue for the innateness of linguistic of linguistic knowledge, but more importantly and more compelling that the fact that these universals are, from the standpoint of communicative efficiency, or from the standpoint of any plausible simplicity reflectively adventitious. These are many conceivable grammars, and those determined by universal grammars, and those determined by universal grammar are not ipso facto the most efficient or the simplest. Nonetheless, all human languages satisfy the constraints of universal grammar. Since either the communicative environment or the communicative tasks can explain this phenomenon. It is reasonable to suppose that it is explained by the structures of the mind ~ and therefore, by the fact that the principles of universal grammar lie innate in the mind and constrain the language that a human can acquire.

Hilary Putnam argues, by appeal to a common-sens e ancestral language by its descendants. Or it might turn out that despite the lack of direct evidence at present the feature of universal grammar in fact do serve either the goals of commutative efficacy or simplicity according in a metric of psychological importance. finally, empiricist point out, the very existence of universal grammar might be a trivial logical artefact: For one thing, many finite sets of structure es whether some features in common. Since there are some finite numbers of languages, it follows trivial that there are features they all share. Moreover, it is argued that many features of universal grammar are interdependent. On one , in fact, the set of fundamentally the same mental principle shared by the world’s languages may be rather small. Hence, even if these are innately determined, the amount not of innate knowledge thereby, required may be quite small as compared with the total corpus of general linguistic knowledge acquired by the first language learner.

These relies are rendered less plausible, innatists argue, when one considers the fact that the error’s language learners make in acquiring their first language seem to be driven far more by abstract features of gramma r than by any available input data. So, despite receiving correct examples of irregular plurals or past-tense forms for verbs, and despite having correctly formed the irregular forms for those words, children will often incorrectly regularize irregular verbs once acquiring mastery of the rule governing regulars in their language. And in general, not only the correct inductions of linguistic rules by young language learners but more importantly, given the absence of confirmatory data and the presence of refuting data, children’s erroneous inductions always consistent with universal gramma r, oftentimes simply representing the incorrect setting of a parameter in the grammar. More generally, innatists argue (Chomsky 1966, 1977 & Crain, 1991) all grammatical rules that have ever been observed satisfy the structure-dependence constraint. That is, many linguistics and psycholinguistics argue that all known grammatical rules of all of the world’s languages, including the fragmentary languages of young children must be started as rules governing hierarchical sentence structure, and not governing, say, sequence of words. Many of these, such as the constituent-command constraint governing anaphor, are highly abstract indeed, and appear to be respected by even very young children. Such constrain may, innatists argue, be necessary conditions of learning natural language in the absence of specific instruction, modelling and correct, conditions in which all first language learners acquire their native language.

Ann important empiricist rely to these observations derives from recent studies of ‘conceptionist’ models of first language acquisition, for which of a ‘connection system’, not previously trained to represent any subset universal grammar that induce grammar which include a large set of regular forms and a few irregulars also tend to over-regularize, exhibiting the same U-shape learning curve seen in human language acquire learning systems that induce grammatical systems acquire ‘accidental’ rules on which they are not explicitly trained but which are not explicit with those upon which they are trained, suggesting, that as children acquire portions of their grammar, they may accidentally ‘learn’ correct consistent rules, which may be correct in human languages, but which then must be ‘unlearned’ in their home language. On the other hand, such ‘empiricist’ language acquisition systems have yet to demonstrate their ability to induce a sufficient wide range of the rules hypothesize to be comprised by universal grammar to constitute a definitive empirical argument for the possibility of natural language acquisition in the absence of a powerful set of innate constraints.

The poverty of the stimulus argument has been of enormous influence in innateness debates, though its soundness is hotly contested. Chomsky notes that (1) the examples of their targe t language to which the language learner is exposed are always jointly compatible with an infinite number of alterative grammars, and so vastly under-determine the grammar of the language, and (2) The corpus always contains many examples of ungrammatical sentences, which should in fact serve as falsifiers of any empirically induced correct grammar of the language, and (3) there is, in general, no explicit reinforcement of correct utterances or correction of incorrect utterances, either by the learner or by those in the immediate training environment. Therefore, he argues, since it is impossible to explain the learning of the correct grammar ~ a task accomplished b all normal children within a very few years ~ on the basis of any available data or known learning algorithms, it must be ta the grammar is innately specified, and is merely ‘triggered’ by relevant environmental cues.

Opponents of the linguistic innateness hypothesis, however, point out that the circumstance that the American linguistic, philosopher and political activist, Noam Avram Chomsky (1929-), who believes that the speed with which children master their native language cannot be explained by learning theory, but requires acknowledging an innate disposition of the mind, an unlearned, innate and universal grammar, suppling the kinds of rule that the child will a priori understand to be embodied in examples of speech with which it is confronted in computational terms, unless the child came bundled with the right kind of software. It cold not catch on to the grammar of language as it in fact does.

As it is wee known from arguments due to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1978, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1972) and the American logician and philosopher Aaron Saul Kripke (1982), that in all cases of empirical abduction, and of training in the use of a word, data underdetermining the theories. The is moral is emphasized by the American philosopher Willard van Orman Quine (1954, 1960) as the principle of the undetermined theory by data. But we, nonetheless, do abduce adequate theories in silence, and we do learn the meaning of words. And it could be bizarre to suggest that all correct scientific theories or the facts of lexical semantics are innate.

But, innatists rely, when the empiricist relies on the underdermination of theory by data as a counter-example, a significant disanalogy with language acquisition is ignored: The abduction of scientific theories is a difficult, labourious process, taking a sophisticated theorist a great deal of time and deliberated effort. First language acquisition, by contrast, is accomplished effortlessly and very quickly by a small child. The enormous relative ease with which such a complex and abstract domain is mastered by such a naïve ‘theorist’ is evidence for the innateness of the knowledge achieved.

Empiricist such as the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-) have rejoined that innatists under-estimate the amount of time that language learning actually takes, focussing only on the number of years from the apparent onset of acquisition to the achievement of relative mastery over the grammar. Instead of noting how short this interval, they argue, one should count the total number of hours spent listening to language and speaking during h time. That number is in fact quite large and is comparable to the number of hours of study and practice required the acquisition of skills that are not argued to derive from innate structures, such as chess playing or musical composition. Hence, they are taken into consideration, and language learning looks like one more case of human skill acquisition than like a special unfolding of innate knowledge.

Innatists, however, note that while the case with which most such skills are acquired depends on general intelligence, language is learned with roughly equal speed, and to roughly the same level of general intelligence. In fact even significantly retarded individuals, assuming special language deficit, acquire their native language on a tine-scale and to a degree comparable to that of normally intelligent children. The language acquisition faculty, hence, appears to allow access to a sophisticated body of knowledge independent of the sophistication of the general knowledge of the language learner.

Empiricist’s reply that this argument ignores the centrality of language in a wide range of human activities and consequently the enormous attention paid to language acquisition by retarded youngsters and their parents or caretakers. They argue as well, that innatists overstate the parity in linguistic competence between retarded children and children of normal intelligence.

Innatists point out that the ‘modularity’ of language processing is a powerful argument for the innateness of the language faculty. There is a large body of evidence, innatists argue, for the claim that the processes that subserve the acquisition, understanding and production of language are quite distinct and independent of those that subserve general cognition and learning. That is to say, that language learning and language processing mechanisms and the knowledge they embody are domain specific ~ grammar and grammatical learning and utilization mechanisms are not used outside of language processing. They are informationally encapsulated ~ only linguistic information is relevant to language acquisition and processing. They are mandatory, and language learning and language processing are automatic. Moreover, language is subserved by specific dedicated neural structures, damage to which predictable and systematically impairs linguistic functioning. All of this suggests a specific ‘mental organ’, to use Chomsky’s phrase, that has evolved in the human cognitive system specifically in order to make language possible. The specific structure is organ simultaneously constrains the range of possible human language s and guide the learning of a child’s target language, later masking rapid on-line language processing possible. The principles represented in this organ constitute the innate linguistic knowledge of the human being. Additional evidence for the early operation of such an innate language acquisition module is derived from the many infant studies that show that infants selectively attend to soundstreams that are prosodically appropriate, which have pauses at clausal boundaries, and that contain linguistically permissible phonological sequence.

It is fair to ask where we get the powerful inner code whose representational elements need only systematic construction to express, for example, the thought that cyclotrons are bigger than black holes. But on this matter, the language of thought theorist has little to say. All that ‘concept’ learning could be (assuming it is to be some kind of rational process and not due to mere physical maturation or a bump on the head). According to the language of thought theorist, is the trying out of combinations of existing representational elements to see if a given combination captures the sense (as evinced in its use) of some new concept. The consequence is that concept learning , conceived as the expansion of our representational resources, simply does not happen. What happens instead is that the work with a fixed, innate repertoire of elements whose combination and construction must express any content we can ever learn to understand.

Representationalist typifies the conforming generality for which of its inclusive manner that by and large induce the doctrine that the mind (or sometimes the brain) works on representations of the things and features of things that we perceive or thing about. In the philosophy of perception the view is especially associated with the French Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and the English philosopher Walter Locke (1632-1704), who, holding that the mind is the container for ideas, held that of our real ideas, some are adequate, and some are inadequate. Those that have in adequacy to, are those represented as archetypes that the mind supposes them taken from which it tends them to stand for, and to which it refers them. The problem in this account were mercilessly exposed by the French theologian as philosopher Antoine Arnauld (1216-94) and the French critic of Cartesianism Simon Foucher (1644-96), writing against Malebranche , and by the idealist George Berkeley, writing against Locke. The fundamental problem is that the mind is ‘supposing’ its ds to represent something else, but it has no access to this something else, except by forming another idea. The difficulty is to understand how the mind ever escapes from the world of representations, or, acquire genuine content pointing beyond themselves in more recent philosophy, the analogy between the mind and a computer has suggest that the mind or brain manipulates signs and symbols, thought of as like the instructions in a machine’s program of aspects of the world. The point is sometimes put by saying that the mind, and its theory, becomes a syntactic engine rather than a semantic engine. Representation is also attacked, at least as a central concept in understanding the ‘pragmatists’ who emphasize instead the activities surrounding a use of language than what they see as a mysterious link between mind and world.

Representations, along with mental states, especially beliefs and thought, are said to exhibit ‘intentionality’ in that they refer to or stand for something other than of what is the possibility of it being something else. The nature of this special property, however, has seemed puling. Not only is intentionality oftentimes assumed to be limited to humans, and possibly a few other species, but the property itself appears to resist characterization in physicalist terms. The problem is most obvious in the case of ‘arbitrary’ signs, like words, where it is clear that there is no connection between the physical properties of a word and what it demotes, and, yet it remains for Iconic representation.

Early attempts tried to establish the link between sign and object via the mental states of the sign and symbol’s user. A symbol # stands for ✺ for ‘S’ if it triggers a ✺-idea in ‘S’. On one account, the reference of # is the ✺idea itself. Open the major account, the denomination of # is whatever the ✺-idea denotes. The first account is problematic in that it fails to explain the link between symbols and the world. The second is problematic in that it just shifts the puzzle inward. For example, if the word ‘table’ triggers the image ‘‒’ or ‘TABLE’ what gives this mental picture or word any reference of all, let alone the denotation normally associated with the word ‘table’?

An alternative to these Mentalistic theories has been to adopt a behaviouristic analysis. Wherefore, this account # denotes ✺ for ‘S’ is explained along the lines of either (1) ‘S’ is disposed to behave to # as to ✺:, or (2) ‘S’ is disposed to behave in ways appropriate to ✺ when presented #. Both versions prove faulty in that the very notions of the behaviour associated with or appropriate to ✺ are obscure. In addition, once seems to be no reasonable correlations between behaviour toward sign and behaviour toward their objects that is capable of accounting for the referential relations.

A currently influential attempt to ‘naturalize’ the representation relation takes its use from indices. The crucial link between sign and object is established by some causal connection between ✺ and #, whereby it is allowed, nonetheless, that such a causal relation is not sufficient for full-blown intention representation. An increase in temperature causes the mercury to rise the thermometer but the mercury level is not a representation for the thermometer. In order for # to represent ✺ to S’s activities. The flunctuational economy of S’s activity. The notion of ‘function’, in turn is yet to be spelled out along biological or other lines so as to remain within ‘naturalistic’ constraints as being natural. This approach runs into problems in specifying a suitable notion of ‘function’ and in accounting for the possibility of misrepresentation. Also, it is no obvious how to extend the analysis to encompass the semantical force of more abstract or theoretical symbols. These difficulties are further compounded when one takes into account the social factors that seem to play a role in determining the denotative properties of our symbols.

The problems faced in providing a reductive naturalistic analysis of representation has led many to doubt that this task is achieved or necessary. Although a story can be told about some words or signs what were learned via association of other causal connections with their referents, there is no reason to believe ht the ‘stand-for’ relation, or semantic notions in general, can be reduced to or eliminated in favour of non-semantic terms.

Although linguistic and pictorial representations are undoubtedly the most prominent symbolic forms we employ, the range of representational systems human understand and regularly use is surprisingly large. Sculptures, maps, diagrams, graphs. Gestures, music nation, traffic signs, gauges, scale models, and tailor’s swatches are but a few of the representational systems that play a role in communication, though, and the guidance of behaviour. Even, the importance and prevalence of our symbolic activities has been taken as a hallmark of human.

What is it that distinguishes items that serve as representations from other objects or events? And what distinguishes the various kinds of symbols from each other? As for the first question, there has been general agreement that the basic notion of a representation involves one thing’s ‘standing for’, ‘being about’, referring to or denoting’ something else. The major debates have been over the nature of this connection between a reorientation and that which it represents. As for the second question, perhaps, the most famous and extensive attempt to organize and differentiate among alternative forms of representation is found in the works of the American philosopher of science Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) who graduated from Harvard in 1859, and apart from lecturing at Walter Hopkins university from 1879 to 1884, had almost no teaching, nonetheless, Peirce’s theory of signs is complex, involving a number of concepts and distinctions that are no longer paid much heed. The aspects of his theory that remains influential and ie widely cited is his division of signs into Icons, Indices and Symbols. Icons are the designs that are said to be like or resemble the things they represent, e.g., portrait painting. Indices are signs that are connected in their objects by some causal dependency, e.g., smoke as a sign of fire. Symbols are those signs that are used and related to their object by virtue of use or associations: They a arbitrary labels, e.g., the word ‘table’. This tripartite division among signs, or variants of this division, is routinely put forth to explain differences in the way representational systems are thought to establish their links to the world. Further, placing a representation in one of the three divisions has been used to account for the supposed differences between conventional and non-conventional representations, between representations that do and do not require learning to understand, and between representations, like language, that need to be read, and those which do not require interpretation. Some theorbists, moreover, have maintain that it is only the use of symbols that exhibits or indicates the presence of mind and mental states.

Over the years, this tripartite division of signs, although often challenged, has retained its influence. More recently, an alterative approach to representational systems (or as he calls them ‘symbolic systems’) has been put forth by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-98) whose classical problem of ‘induction’ is often phrased in terms of finding some reason to expect that nature is uniform, in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1954) Goodman showed that we need in addition some reason for preferring some uniformities to others, for without such a selection the uniformity of nature is vacuous, yet Goodman (1976) has proposed a set of syntactic and semantic features for categorizing representational systems. His theory provided for a finer discrimination among types of systems than a philosophy of science and language as partaken to and understood by the categorical elaborations as announced by Peirce. What also emerges clearly is that many rich and useful systems of representation lack a number of features taken to be essential to linguistic or sentential forms of representation, e.g., discrete alphabets and vocabularies, syntax, logical structure, inferences rules, compositional semantics and recursive e compounding devices.

As a consequence, although these representations can be appraised for accuracy or correctness. It does not seem possible to analyse such evaluative notion along the lines of standard truth theories, geared as they are to the structure found in sentential systems.

In light of this newer work, serious questions have been raised at the soundness of the tripartite division and about whether various of the psychological and philosophical claims concerning conventionality, learning, interpretation, and so forth, that have been based on this traditional analysis, can be sustained. It is of special significance e that Goodman has joined a number of theorists in rejecting accounts of Iconic representation in terms of resemblance. The rejection has ben twofold, first, as Peirce himself recognized, resemblance is not sufficient to establish the appropriate referential relations. The numerous prints of lithograph do not represent one another any more than an identical twin represent his or her sibling. Something more than resemblance is needed to establish the connection between an Icon and picture and what it represents. Second, since Iconic representations lack as may properties as they share with their referents, sand certain non-Iconic symbol can be placed vin correspondences with their referents. It is difficult to provide a non-circular account of what the similarity I at distinguishes Icons from other forms of representation. What is more, even if these two difficulties could be resolved, it would not show that the representational function of picture can be understood independently of an associated system of interpretations. The design, □, may be a picture of a mountain of the economy in a foreign language. Or it may have no representational significance at all. Whether it is a representation and what kind of representation it uses, is relative to a system of interpretation.

If so, then, what is the explanatory role of providing reasons for our psychological states and intentional acts? Clearly part of this role comes from the justificatory nature of the reason-giving relation: ‘Things are made intelligible by being revealed to be, or to approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be’. For some writers the justificatory and explanatory tasks of reason-giving simple coincide. The manifestation of rationality is seen as sufficient to explain states or acts quite independently of questions regarding causal origin. Within this model the greater the degree of rationality we can detect, the more intelligible the sequence will b e. where there is a breakdown in rationality, as in cases of weakness of will or self-deception, there is a corresponding breakdown in our ability to make the action/belief intelligible.

The equation of the justificatory and explanatory role of rationality links can be found within two quite distinct picture. One account views the attribute of rationality from a third-person perspective. Attributing intentional states to others, and by analogy to ourselves, is a matter of applying to them a certain pattern of interpretation. We ascribe that ever states enables us to make sense of their behaviour as conforming to a rational pattern. Such a mode of interpretation is commonly an ex post facto affair, although such a mode of interpretation can also aid prediction. Our interpretations are never definitive or closed. They are always open to revision and modification in the light of future behaviour. If such revision enable person as a whole to appear more rational. Where we fail to detect of seeing a system then we give up the project of seeing a system as rational and instead seek explanations of a mechanistic kind.

The other picture is resolutely firs-personal, linked to the claimed prospectively of rationalizing explanations we make an action, for example, intelligible by adopting the agent’s perspective on it. Understanding is a reconstruction of actual or possible decision making. It is from such a first-personal perspective that goals are detected as desirable and the courses of action appropriated to the situation. The standpoint of an agent deciding how to act is not that of an observer predicting the next move. When I found something desirable and judge an act in an appropriate rule for achieving it, I conclude that a certain course of action should be taken. This is different from my reflecting on my past behaviour and concluding that I will do ‘X’ in the future.

For many writers, it is, nonetheless, the justificatory and explanatory role of reason cannot simply be equated. To do so fails to distinguish well-formed cases thereby I believe or act because of these reasons. I may have beliefs but your innocence would be deduced but nonetheless come to believe you are innocent because you have blue eyes. Yet, I may have intentional states that give altruistic reasons in the understanding for contributing to charity but,. Nonetheless, out of a desire to earn someone’s good judgment. In both these cases. Even though my belief could be show to be rational in the light of other beliefs, and my action, of whether the forwarded belief become desirously actionable, that of these rationalizing links would form part of a valid explanation of the phenomena concerned. Moreover, cases inclined with an inclination toward submission. As I continue to smoke although I judge it would be better to abstain. This suggests, however, that the mere availability of reasoning cannot, least of mention., have the quality of being of itself an sufficiency to explain why it occurred.

If we resist the equation of the justificatory and explanatory work of reason-giving, we must look fora connection between reasons and action/belief in cases where these reasons genuinely explain, which is absent otherwise to mere rationalizations (a connection that is present when enacted on the better of judgements, and not when failed). Classically suggested, in this context is that of causality. In cases of genuine explanation, the reason-providing intentional states are applicable stimulations whose cause of holding to belief/actions for which they also provide for reasons. This position, in addition, seems to find support from considering the conditional and counter-factuals that our reason-providing explanations admit as valid, only for which make parallel those in cases of other causal explanations. Imagine that I am approaching the Sky Dome’s executives suites looking for the cafeteria. If I believe the café is to the left, I turn accordingly. If my approach were held steadfast for which the Sky Dome has, for itself the explanation that is simply by my desire to find the cafê, then in the absence of such a desire I would not have walked in the direction that led toward the executive suites, which were stationed within the Sky Dome. In general terms, where my reasons explain my action, then the presence to the future is such that for reasons were, in those circumstances, necessary for the action and, at least, made probable for its occurrence. These conditional links can be explained if we accept that the reason-giving link is also a causal one. Any alternative account would therefore also need to accommodate them.

The defence of the view that reasons are causes for which seems arbitrary, least of mention, ‘Why does explanation require citing the cause of the cause of a phenomenon but not the next link in the chain of causes? Perhaps what is not generally true of explanation is true only of mentalistic explanation: Only in giving the latter type are we obliged to give the cause of as cause. However, this too seems arbitrary. What is the difference between mentalistic and non-mentalistic explanation that would justify imposing more stringent restrictions on the former? The same argument applies to non-cognitive mental stares, such as sensations or emotions. Opponents of behaviourism sometimes reply that mental states can be observed: Each of us, through ‘introspection’, can observe at least some mental states, namely our own, least of mention, those of which we are conscious.

To this point, the distinction between reasons and causes is motivated in good part by a desire to separate the rational from the natural order. However, its probable traces are reclined of a historical coefficient of reflectivity as Aristotle’s similar (but not identical) distinction between final and efficient cause, engendering that (as a person, fact, or condition) which proves responsible for an effect. Recently, the contrast has been drawn primarily in the domain or the inclining inclinations that manifest some territory by which attributes of something done or effected are we to engage of actions and, secondarily, elsewhere.

Many who have insisted on distinguishing reasons from causes have failed to distinguish two kinds of reason. Consider its reason for sending a letter by express mail. Asked why id so, I might say I wanted to get it there in a day, or simply, to get it there in as day. Strictly, the reason is repressed by ‘to get it there in a day’. But what this express to my reason only because I am suitably motivated: I am in a reason state, as wanting to get the letter there in a day. It is reason state’s especially wants, beliefs and intentions ~ and not reasons strictly so called, that are candidates for causes. The latter are abstract contents of propositional altitudes: The former are psychological elements that play motivational roles.

If reason states can motivate, however, why (apart from confusing them with reasons proper) deny that they are causes? For one can say that they are not events, at least in the usual sense entailing change, as they are dispositional states (this contrasts them with occurrences, but not imply that they admit of dispositional analysis). It has also seemed to those who deny that reasons are causes that the former justify as well as explain the actions for which they are reasons, whereas the role of causes is at most to explain. As other claim is that the relation between reasons (and for reason states are often cited explicitly) and the actions they explain is non-contingent, whereas the relation causes to their effects is contingent. The ‘logical connection argument’ proceeds from this claim to the conclusion that reasons are not causes.

These arguments are inconclusive, first, even if causes are events, sustaining causation may explain, as where the [states of] standing of a broken table is explained by the (condition of) support of staked boards replacing its missing legs. Second, the ‘because’ in ‘I sent it by express because I wanted to get it there in a day; is in some semi-causal ~ explanation would at best be construed as only rationalizing, than justifying action? And third, if any non-contingent connection can be established between, say, my wanting something and the action it explains, there are close causal analogism such as the connection between brining a magnet to iron filings and their gravitating to it: This is, after all, a ‘definitive’ connection, expressing part of what it is to be magnetic, yet the magnet causes the fillings to move.

There I then, a clear distinction between reasons proper and causes, and even between reason states and event causes: But the distinction cannot be used to show that the relations between reasons and the actions they justify is in no way causal. Precisely parallel points hold in the epistemic domain (and indeed, for all similarly admit of justification, and explanation, by reasons). Suppose my reason for believing that you received it today is that I sent it by express yesterday. My reason, strictly speaking, is that I sent it by express yesterday: My reason state is my believing this. Arguably reason justifies the further proposition I believe for which it is my reason and my reason state ~ my evidence belief ~ both explains and justifies my belief that you received the letter today. I an say, that what justifies that belief is [in fact] that I sent the letter by express yesterday, but this statement expresses my believing that evidence proposition, and you received the letter is not justified, it is not justified by the mere truth of the proposition (and can be justified even if that proposition is false).

Similarly, there are, for belief for action, at least five main kinds of reason (1) normative reasons, reasons (objective grounds) there are to believe (say, to believe that there is a green-house-effect): (2) Person-relative normative reasons, reasons for [say] me to believe, (3) subjective reasons, reasons I have to believe (4) explanatory reasons, reasons why I believe, and (5) motivating reasons for which I believe. Tenets of (1) and (2) are propositions and thus, not serious candidates to be causal factors. The states corresponding to (3) may not be causal elements. Reasons why, tenet (4) are always (sustaining) explainers, though not necessarily even prima facie justifier, since a belief can be casually sustained by factors with no evidential value. Motivating reasons are both explanatory and possess whatever minimal prima facie justificatory power (if any) a reason must have to be a basis of belief.

Current discussion of the reasons-causes issue has shifted from the question whether reason state can causally explain to the perhaps, deeper questions whether they can justify without so explaining, and what kind of causal states with actions and beliefs they do explain. ‘Reliabilist’ tend to take as belief as justified by a reason only if it is held at least in part for that reason, in a sense implying, but not entailed by, being causally based on that reason. ‘Internalists’ oftentimes deny this, as, perhaps, thinking we lack internal access to the relevant causal connections. But internalists need internal access to what justified ~ say, the reason state ~ and not to the (perhaps quite complex) relations it bears the belief it justifies, by virtue for which it does so. Many questions also remain concerning the very nature of causation, reason-hood, explanation and justification.

Nevertheless, for most causal theorists, the radical separation of the causal and rationalizing role of reason-giving explanations is unsatisfactory. For such theorists, where we can legitimately point to an agent’s reasons to explain a certain belief or action, then those features of the agent’s intentional states that render the belief or action reasonable must be causally relevant in explaining how the agent came to believe or act in a way which they rationalize. One way of putting this requirement is that reason-giving states not only cause but also causally explain their explananda.

The general attempt to understand the components of a working language, the relationship the understanding speaker has to its elements, and the relationship they bear to the world. The subject therefore, embraces the traditional division of ‘semiotic into ‘syntax’, ‘semantics’, and ;’pragmatics’. The philosophy of language thus mingles with the philosophy of mind, since it needs an account of what it is in our understanding that enables us to use language. It also mingles with the metaphysics of truth and the relationship with the metaphysics of truth and the relationship between sign and object. Much philosophy especially in the 20th century, has been informed by the belief that philosophy of language is the fundamental basis of all philosophical problems, in that language is the distinctive exercise of mind, and the distinctive way in which we give shape to metaphysical beliefs. Particular topics will include the problems of ‘logical form’ and the basis of the division between ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’, as well as problems of understanding the number and nature of specifically semantic relationships such as ‘meaning’, ‘reference’, ‘prediction’, and ‘quantification’. Pragmatics include the theory of ‘speech acts’, while problems of ‘rule following’ and the ‘indeterminacy of translation’ infect philosophies of both pragmatics and semantics.

There is no denying it, the language of thought hypothesis has a compelling neatness about it. A thought is depicted as a structure of internal representational elements, combined in a lawful way , and playing a certain functional role in an internal processing economy.

In the philosophy of mind, an adequate conception of mind and its relationship to matter should explain how it is possible for mental events to interact with the rest of the world, and in particular to themselves have a causal influence on the physical world. It is easy to think that this must be impossible: It takes a physical cause to have a physical effect. Yet, every day experience and theory alike show that it is commonplace. Consciousness could hardly have evolved if it had, had no uses. In general, it is a measure of the success of any theory of mind and body that it should enable us to avoid ‘epiphenomenalism’.

On the same course, the Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist David Hume (1711-76), said that the earlier of two causally related events is always the cause, and the later effect. However, there are a number of objections to using the earlier-later ‘arrow of time’ to analyse the directional ‘arrow of causation’. In that, it seems in principle possible that some causes and effects could be simultaneous. More of the essence, the idea that time is directed from ‘earlier’ to ‘later’ itself stands in need of philosophical explanation ~ and one of the most popular explanation is that the idea of ‘movement’ from earlier to later depend on the fact that cause-effect pairs always have a given orientation in time. Even so, if we adopt such a ‘casual theory of the arrow of time’, and explain ‘earlier’ as the direction in which causes lie, and ‘later’ as the direction of effects, then we will clearly need to find some account of the direction of causality which does not itself assume the direction of time.

A number of such accounts have been proposed. The American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), has argued that the asymmetry of causation derives from an ‘asymmetry of over-determination’. The over-determination of present events by past events ~ consider a person who dies after simultaneously being shot and struck by lightning ~ is a very rare occurrence. By contrast, the multiple ‘over determination’ of present events by future events is absolutely normal. This is because the future, unlike the past, will always contain multiple traces of any present event. To use Lewis’s example, when the president presses the red button in the White House, the future effects do not only include the dispatch of nuclear missiles, but also his finger-print on the button, his trembling, the further depletion of his tonic and gin, the recording of the button’s click on tape, the emission of light from the passage of the signal current, and so on, and on, and on.

Lewis relates this asymmetry of over-determination to the asymmetry of causation as if we are to assume the cause of a given effect to have been absent, then this implies the effect would have been absent too, since (apart from freaks like the lightning-shooting case) there will not be any other causes left to ‘fix’ the effect. By contrast, if we suppose a given effect of some cause to have been absent, this does not imply the cause would have been absent, for there are still all the other traces left to ‘fix’ the cause. Lewis argues that these counterfactual considerations suffice to show why causes are different from effects.

Other philosophers appeal to a probabilistic variant of Lewis’s asymmetry. Following Reichenbach (1956), they note that the different causes of any given type of effect are normally probabilistically independent of each other: By contrast, the different effects of any given type of cause are normally probabilistically correlated. For example, both fat people are more likely to get excited than thin ones: The fact that both lung cancer and nicotine-stained fingers can result from smoking does imply that lung cancer is more likely among people with nicotine-stained fingers. So this account distinguishes effects from causes by the fact that the former, but not the ;latter, are probabilistically dependent on each other.

Even so, fundamental trajectories take upon the crescentic edge-horizons of ‘directedness’ or ‘aboutness’ of many, if not all, conscious states. The term was used by the ‘scholastics’, but revived in the 19th century by German philosopher and phytologist Franz Clemens Brentano (1838-1917). Our beliefs, thoughts, wishes, dreams, and desires are about things. Equally, the words we use to express these beliefs and other mental states are about things. The problem of intentionality is that of understanding the relation obtaining between a mental state, or its expression, and the things it is about. A number of peculiarities attend this relation. First, if I an in some relation to a chair, for instance by sitting on it, then both it and I must exist. But while mostly one thinks about things that exist, sometimes (although this way of putting it has its problems) ne has beliefs, hopes, and fears about things that do not, as when the child expects Santa Claus, and the child fears Zeus. Secondly, if I sit on the chair and the chair is the oldest antique in Toronto, then I it on the oldest antique in Toronto. But if I plan to avoid the mad axeman, and the mad axeman is in fact my friendly postman, I do not therefore plan to avoid my friendly postman. Intentional relations seem to depend on how the object is specified, or as Frége put it, on the mode of presentation of the object. This makes them quite the relations whose logic we can understand by means of the predicate calculus, and this peculiarity has implicated an unusual mental or emotional effect on those capable of reaction, especially those philosophers notably the American philosopher Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000), who declared them unfit for use in serious science. More widespread is the view that since the concept is indispensable, we must either declare serious science unable to deal with the serious features of the mind, or explain how serious science may include intentionality. One approach in which we communicate fears and beliefs have a two-fold aspect, involving both the objects referred to, and the mode of presentation under which they are thought of, we can see the mind as essentially related to them, intentionality then becomes a feature of language, rather than a metaphysical or ontological peculiarity of the mental world.

The attitudes are philosophically puzzling because it is not easy to see how the intentionality of the attitudes fits with another conception of them, as local mental phenomena.

Beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears seem to be located in the heads or minds of the people that have them. Our attitudes are accessible to us through ‘introspection’. We think of attitudes as being caused at certain times by events that impinge on the subject’s body, specifically by perceptual events, such as reading a newspaper or seeing a picture of an ice-cream cone. Still, the psychological level of description carries with it a mode of explanation which ‘has no echo in physical theory’, wherefore, a major influence on philosophy of mind and language in the latter half of the 20th century brought Davidson to introduce the position known as ‘anomalous monism’ in the philosophy of mind, instigating a vigorous debate over the relation between mental and physical descriptions of persons, and the possibility of genuine explanation of events in terms of psychological properties. Following but enlarging upon the works of Quine on language, Davidson concentrated upon the figure of the ‘radical interpreter’, arguing that the method of interpreting a language could be thought of as constructing a ‘truth definition’ in the style of Alfred Tarski (1901-83), in which the systematic contribution of elements of sentences to their overall meaning is laid bare. The construction takes place within a generally holistic theory of knowledge and meaning. A radical interpreter can tell when a subject holds a sentence true, and using the principle of charity ends up making an assignment of truth conditions to individual sentence s. although Davidson is a defender of the doctrines of the ‘indeterminacy of radical translation and the ‘scrutability’ of reference, his approach has seemed to many to offer some hope of identifying meaning as a respectable notion, even within a broader extensional approach to language. Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is anything to translate.

These attitudinal values can in turn cause in other mental phenomena, and eventually in the observable behaviour of the subject. Seeing the picture of an ice-cream cone leads to a desire for one, which leads me to forget the meaning I am supposed to attend and walk to the ice-cream sho instead. All of this seems to require that attitudes be states and activities that are localized in the subject.

But the phenomena of intentionality suggests that the attitudinal values are essentially relational in nature, they involve relations to the propositions at which they are directed and at the objects they are about. These objects may be quite remote from the minds of subjects. An attitudinal value seems to be individuated by the agent, the type of attitude (belief, desire, and so forth). It seems essential to the attitude reported by a role of assertion that it is directed toward the proposition that is directed propositionally proper.

Even so, the formulation ‘actions are doing that are intentional under some description’ reflects the minimizing view of the individuation of actions. The idea is that for what I did that count as an action, there must be a description ‘V-ing’ of what I did, such that I V’ d intentionally. Still, since (on the minimizing view) my causing the modification was the same even s my greeting you, and I greeted you intentionally, this event was an action. Or, suppose I did not know it was you on the phone, and thought it was my spouse. Still, I would have said ‘Good-morning’ intentionally, and that suffices for this event, however described to be an action. My snoring and involuntary coughing, nonetheless, are not intentional under any description, and so are not definite actions.

No matter, the standard confusion in the philosophical literature is to suppose that there is some special connection between intentionality-with-a-t, and intentionality-with-an-a, some authors even allege that these are identical. But, in fact, the two notions are quite distinct. Intentionality-with-a-t, is that property of the mind by which it is directed at, or is about objects and states of affairs in the world. Intentionality-with-an-s, is that phenomenon by which sentences fail to satisfy certain tests for extentionality.

There are many standard test for extentionality, but substitutability of identical two most common in the literature are substitutability of identicals and existential inference. The principle of substitutability states that referable expressions can be substituted for other without changing the truth value of the statement in which the substitution is made. The principle of existential inference states that any statement which contains a referring expression implies the existence of the object referred to, by that expression. But there are statements that do not satisfy these principles such statements are said to be intentional with respect to these tests for extentionality. An example is given as such from the statement that:



(1) The sheriff believes that Mr Howard is an honest man

And:

(2) Mr Howard is identical with the notorious outlaw, Jesse James

It does not follow that:

(3) The sheriff believes that the notorious outlaw, Jesse James, is an honest man.

This is a failure of the substitutability of identicals.

From the fact:

(4) Billy believes that Santa Claus will come on Christmas Eve

It does not follow that:

(5) There is some ‘x’ such that Billy believes ‘x’ will come on Christmas Eve.

This is a failure of existential inference. Thus, statements (1) and (4) fail tests for extentionality and hence are said to be intentional with respect to these tests.

A proper understanding of intentionality is crucial to the study of a number of topics in cognitive science, including perception, imagery, and consciousness. The term itself, intentionality, can be misleading, in suggesting intentional action, doing something intentionally, with a certain aim or purpose. In cognitive science, the term is used in a different, more technical sense. Intentionality involves reference or aboutness or some similar relation to something having what the scholastics of the Middle Ages called intentional inexistence.

When Ruth thinks of Wally K., as a cognitive scientist, the intentional object of her thought is Wally K., and the intentional content of her thought is that Wally K., is a cognitive scientist. She has a mental representation of him as a cognitive scientist. What Ruth thinks about has intentional inexistence in the sense that her thoughts may be wrong and she can have thoughts about things that do not even exist. She may think incorrectly that Wally K., is a computer scientist or even that Santa Claus is a computer scientist.

If you treat intentionality as a relation to an intentional object, you must remember that it is not a real relation in the way that kissing or touching is. A real relation holds between two existing things independently of how they are conceived. When a woman kisses a man and the man she kisses is bald, the woman kisses a bald man. But Ruth can think about a man who happens to be bald without thinking of him as bald: She may represent him as hairy. Similarly. Ruth can think of someone who does not exist but cannot kiss or touch someone who does no exist.

Looking for something is an example of an intentional activity in this technical sense of intentional as well as in the more ordinary sense having to do with what you are aiming at. You sometimes look for things that turn out not to exist. Ponce de Leon searched in Florida for the fountain of youth. Also, thee was no such thing to be found.

There can be intentionality without representation. For example, needing something is an intentional phenomenon. The grass in my lawn can need water even though it is not going to get any and even if there is no water to give it. But the grass does not represent the water it needs.

Other examples of intentional phenomena include spoken and written language, gestures, representational paintings, photographs, films, road maps, and traffic lights. It is controversial how these last instances of intentionality are related to the intentionality of thoughts and other cognitive states.

Nonexistent intentional objects like Santa Claus and the fountain of youth raise difficult logical puzzles if taken seriously as objects. What properties do they have? What sorts of properties does Santa Claus have, as he in conceived by a certain child? Perhaps he is fat, lives at the North pole, dresses in red, drives a sleigh, brings presents to children at Christmas time, and has in at least, eight reindeer. But intentional objects cannot always have all the properties which they are envisioned as having, because, as in the case on the child’s conception of Santa Claus, a nonexistent intentional object may be envisioned as existent, and it is inconsistent to suppose that something could be both existent and nonexistent.

You must resist the temptation to try to resolve such problems by identifying intentional objects with mental objects such as ideas or mental representations. That identification does not work. The child does have an idea of Santa Claus, and Ponce de Leon had an idea of the fountain of youth. But the child does not believe that his idea of Santa Claus lives at the North Pole. Nor was Ponce de Leon looking for a mental representation of the fountain of youth. He already had a mental representation: He was looking for the [intentional] object of that representation.

Is it enough to say that a nonexistent intentional object is a merely possible object ~ is not a completely general account, because some intentional objects are not even possible? Someone may try to find the greatest prime number without realizing that there is no such thing. The intentional object of the attempt ~ the greatest prime number ~ is not a possible object. There is no possible world in which it exists.

One controversy concerning intentionality concerns how to provide a logically adequate account of talk of intentional objects. That is a controversy in philosophical logic and may not be especially important to the rest of cognitive science.

The moral is that, on the other, in which you have to take of nonexistent intentional objects with a grain of salt, without being too serious about the notion that there really are such things. And, yet, you have to be careful not to conclude that the child pondering Santa Claus is not really thinking about anything o that Ponce de Leon was not really looking for anything as he wandered through Florida.

To what extent does cognition involve intentionality? In one view, everything cognitive is intentional: Intentional inexistence is the mark of the mental, according to the German philosopher and psychologist Franz Clemens Brentano (1838-1917), who may be regarded as the foundation of the phenomenological movement in philosophy. His major work was ‘Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunld’ (1864, trans., as ‘Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint’, (1973) which rehabilitates the medieval concentration of the mental as a fundamental aspect, as well, he wrote on theological matter, and on moral philosophy, where the directedness of emotions allows a notion of their correct and incorrect objects, thus permitting him a notion of moral objectivity.



Clearly, many feelings recognized in folk psychology have intentionality and are not simply raw feels. A child hopes that Santa Claus will bring a big red fire truck and fears that Santa Claus will bring a lump of coal instead. The child is happy that Christmas is tomorrow and unhappy that he hasn’t been a good little boy for the past few weeks. A child’s hopes, fears, happiness, and unhappiness have intentional object and intentional content.

It is unclear whether all feelings or emotions have intentional content in this way. Do feelings of ‘free-floating’ anxiety and depression have no intentional content, so that you are not anxious about anything or depressed about anything, but just depressed? Or do such states have a very general nonspecific content, so that you are anxious about things in general or depressed about things in general, just not anxious or depressed about something specific? It is hard to say what turns on the answer to these questions, however.

Perceptual experience has intentionality insomuch as it presents or represents a certain environment. How perceptual experience present’s o represents things may be accurate or inaccurate. Things may or may not be as they seem to be. Sometimes what you see or seem to see does not really exit, as when William Shakspere’s Macbeth hallucinated a bloody dagger.

The intentional content of perceptual experience is sortally perspectival, representing how things are from here, or even representing how things are as perceived from this place. The content of the experience may even be in part about the experience itself: What ids perceived is perhaps seen as causing that very experience.

The dagger is an intentional object of Macbeth’s perceptual experience. That’s what he is or seems to be aware of. You may be tempted to think that Macbeth must be aware of a mental image of a dagger, but that is like thinking that Ponce de Leon must have been trying to find an idea of the fountain of youth.

Reconditions amounting to mental imagery have intentionality. What you image or imagine is the intentional object of your imagining or imaging. When you picture Lucy’s smile is what you imagine. Theories of imagery offer accounts of the structure of the inner representation involved in one’s imagery and the processes that operate on the structure. But what you imagine is not that inner mental representation, you imagine Lucy’s smile.

The term ‘mental image’ is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to the imagining of that thing, picturing Lucy smiling. Sometimes it refers to the hypothetical inner representation formed when something is imagined, an inner mental picture or description of Lucy smiling. It is important not to confuse these things. Otherwise, the substantial claim that imagination involves the construction of inner pictures or the sorts of mental representations with specific structures will be conflated with the obvious fact that you are capable of imaging various things.

Similarly, it is important to distinguish imaging something revolving from actually revolving a mental representation in your mind or head: It is important to distinguish imagining scanning a scene from scanning an inner mental representation.

It is controversial what sort of introspective awareness you have of your inner mental representations. Matters are only confused through failure to distinguish the various senses of mental image. You have something that might be called ‘introspective’ awareness of mental images in the first sense: Namely, the intentional object of your thoughts. You often know what you are thinking about, imagining, perceiving, and so forth. It is unclear whether you have any corresponding access to the mental representations, if any, underlying your thinking, imagining, perceiving, and so forth.

The ascendancy of cognitive approaches to mind has brought with it a renewed interest in imagery. Two problems concerning representation have held centre stage in these discussions, as the first problem, is of a piece with older ontological worries over the status of so-called ‘pictures in the mind’. Proponents of imaginistic theories often talk in ways that seem to presuppose that images are objects, like physical objects, that can be rotated, scanned, approached, enlarged, and so forth. Yet it is hard to make sense of such reification, given that mental images have no mass, physical size, shape, or location. The second problem concerning imagery has close ties to debates over the adequacy of the (digital) computer model of mind. The reason for this is that images are typically identified with pictures and thus allied with analogue representation. So it is held that if we employ images in cognition, it shows that claims that all mental representation is propositional or sentential, i.e., digital, is false. In turn, if mental processing involves the use of non-digital, pictorial representations, our minds and cognitive activities cannot be understood within the constraints of the standard computer model. Although seemingly separate mattes, the issue of ontological reification and the issue of ontological reification and the issue for those who assume that analogue representational function via their sharing or having features analogous to those they represent. Most proponents of imaginistic explanation allow that their theories would be unsustainable if they did require that their literally be items in the mind that possessed spatial dimensions and other physical properties. They have offered various proposals attempting to show how it is possible to cash in on talk, of using or manipulating images without falling into the trap of reification. In any case, it should be clear that questions of reification also pose a problem for proponents of sentential models of mind, who claim that we think in words. For the ontological quandary of giving a satisfactory account of how there can be pictures or maps in the head is at root no different from the problem of how there can be words and sentences in the head. And if a satisfactory answer is available to the latter, it should be adaptable to the former.

A good deal of the debate over imagery has been obscured by problematic accounts of the basis of the ‘stand for’ relation and by unsupported assumptions about the nature, function and distinction between and among linguistic and non-linguistic forms of representation. For example, it is common for both proponents and critics of imagery to identify images with pictures or picture-like items, and then take it for granted that pictorial representation can be explained in terms of resemblance or some other notion of 1 ~ 1 correspondence, or assume that since pictures are like their referents they require no interpretation. But it is highly questionable whether such accounts are adequate for dealing with our everyday use of pictures (maps, diagrams, and so forth), in cognition. The difficulties involved with this older understanding of Iconic representation become more acute when applied in imaginistic or mental pictures.

Expanding the representational domain is something problematic in the very way the imagery controversy, along with other debates over mind and cognition have been set up as a choice between whether humans employ one or two kinds of representational systems. As we know that humans make use of an enormous number of different types of [external] representational systems. These systems differ in form and structure along a variety of syntactic, semantical and other dimensions. It would appear there is no sense in which these various and diverse systems can be divided into two well-specified kinds. Nor does it seem possible to reduce, decode, or capture the cognitive content of all of these forms of representation into sentential symbols. Any adequate theory of mind is going to have to deal with the fact that many more than two types of representation are employed in our cognitive activities, then, to assume that yet-to-be discovered modes of internal representation must fit neatly into one or twp pre-ordained categories.

Appeals to representations play a prominent role in contemporary work in the study of mind. With some justification, most attention has been focussed on language or language-like symbol systems. Even when some non-linguistic systems are countenanced, they tend to be given second-class status. This practice, however, has had a rather constricting affect on our understanding of human cognitive activities. It has, for example, resulted in a lack of serious examination of the function of the arts in organizing the reorganizing our world. And the cognitive uses of metaphor, expression. Exemplification, and the like are typically ignored. Moreover, recognizing that a much broader range of representational systems play a number of philosophical presuppositions and doctrines in the study of mind into question: (1) Claims about the unique of representation as the mark of the mental (2) the identification of contentful or informational states with the sentential of propositional attitudes: (3) The idea that all thought can be expressed in language (4) the assumption that compositional accounts of the structure of language provide the only model we have for the exhibits or productive nature of representational systems in general, and (5) The tendency to construe all cognitive transitions among representations as cases of inference (based on syntactic or logical form.)

Thought, in having contents, possess semantic properties, and, fundamentally, a central assumption in much current philosophy of mind, is that, propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires play a causal or explanatory role in mediating between perception and behaviour ~ in terms of reasons ~ we ourselves and each other as ‘rational purposive creatures, fitting our beliefs to the world as we perceive it and seeing to obtain what we desire in the light of them. Reasoning-giving explanation can be offered not only for actions and beliefs, which will gain most attention to this entry: But, also, for desires, intentions, hopes, fears, angers within a network of rationalizing links is part of the individuating characteristics of this range of psychological states and the intentional acts they explain. Even though

the reason-giving relation is a normative claim, as such of a reason for believing, acting, and so forth, that if, given to other psychological states, this belief/action is justified or appropriate profoundly of someone’s reason consists in making clear this justificatory link. Paradigmatically, the psychological states that provide an agent with reason and intentional states individuated in terms of their propositional content, are links of the rationalization of this range of psychological states and intentional acts they explain. The associated process of simple ideas we are evermore of an understanding the fundamental aspect attributed to content. This causal-explanatory conception of propositional attitudes, however, casts little light on their representational aspects. The casual-explanatory y role of beliefs and desires depend on how they interact with each other and with subsequent actions. But the representational contents of such states can often involve referential relations to external entities with which thinkers are causally quite unconnected. These referential relations thus seem extraneous to the causal-explanatory roles of mental states. It follows that the causal-explanatory conception of mental states must somehow be amplified or supplemented if it is to account for representational content. Yet, mental events, states or processes with content include seeing the door is shut, believing you are being followed and calculating the square root of two. Saying that, as mental state with content can fail to refer, but there always exist s a specific condition for a state with content to refer to certain things. When the state has a correctness or fulfilment condition, its correctness is determined by whether its referents have the properties the content specifies for them.

In general, we cannot understand a person’s reasons for acting as he does without knowing the array of emotions and sensation to which he is subject, of what is remembered and of what is forgotten, and how reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content involving perceptual states, which play a fundamental role in individuating content, cannot be understood purely in terms relating to minimal rationality. Overall, contents are normally specified by ‘that . . .’ clauses, and it is natural to suppose that a content has the same kind of sequential and hierarchical structure as the sentence that specifies it. This supposition would be widely accepted for conceptual content. It is, however, a substantive thesis that all content is conceptual. One way of treating one sort of perceptual content is to regard the content as determined by a spatial type, the type under which the region of space around the perceiver must fall if the experience with that content is to represent the environment correctly. So, that all content is conceptual legitimacy for using these spatial types in giving the content of experience does not undermine the thesis that all content is conceptual. Such supporters will say, that the spatial type is just a way of capturing what can equally be captured by conceptual components such as ‘that distance’, or ‘that direction’, where these demonstratives are made available by the perception in question. Thar non-conceptual content will respond that these demonstratives themselves cannot be elucidated without mentioning the spatial type which lack sentence-like structure.

Beliefs are true or false. If, as representationalists had it, beliefs are relations to mental representations, then beliefs must be relations to representations that have truth values among their semantic properties. Sentences, at least declaratives, are exactly the kind of representations that ave truth values, this in virtue of denoting and attributing. So, if mental representations are as sententialism says, we could readily account for the truth valuation of mental representations.

Beliefs serve a function within the mental economy. They play a central part in reasoning and, thereby, contribute to the control of behaviour of which has lead into the topic through which elaborative considerations have been defended with that in a number of philosophers and psychologists. The contributive rationalities depict of a set of beliefs, desires, and actions, also perceptions, intentions, and decisions, must fit together in various ways. If they do not, in the extreme case they fail to constitute a mind at all ~ no rationality, no agent. This core notion of rationality in philosophy of mind thus concern a cluster of personal identity conditions, that is, holistic coherence requirements upon the system of elements comprising a person’s mind. As such, functionalism about content and meaning appears to lead to holism. In general transition between mental stares and between mental states and behaviour depend on the contents of the mental states themselves. If I believe that sharks are dangerous, I will infer from sharks being in the water to the conclusion that people should not be swimming. Suppose I first think that sharks are dangerous, but then change m mind, coming to think that sharks are not dangerous. However, the content that the first belief affirms cannot be the same as the content that the second belief denies, because the transition relations (e.g., the inference from sharks being in the water to what people should do) that constitute the contents changed when I changed my mind. A natural functionalist reply is to say that some transitions are relevant to content individualists have not told us how to do that. Appeal to a traditional analytic/synthetic distinction clearly would do. For example, ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ would have the same content on such a view. It could not be analytic that dogs bark or that cats meow, since we can imagine a non-barking breed of dog and a non-meowing breed of cat. If ‘Dogs are animals’ is analytic, so is ‘Cats are animals’. If ‘Cats are adult kittens’ is analytic, so is ‘Dogs are adult puppies’. Dogs are not cats ~ but then cats are not dogs. So a functionalist account will not find traditional analytic inference relations that will distinguish the meaning of ‘dog’ from the meaning of ‘cat’. Other functionalist accept holism for ‘narrow content’, attempting to accommodate intuitions about the stability of content by appealing to wide content.