In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Austin, from apples to unicorns, from former president Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus.
How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? They are not there to be thought about, yet we think about them just as easily as we think about things that do exist.
Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve nonexistent things.
The explanation centers on a new theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve nonexistent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannot always substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Mark Sainsburys new theory, display theory, explains these anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attribution depends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking.
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Mark Sainsbury presents an original account of how language works when describing mental states, based on a new theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. He offers solutions to longstanding puzzles about how we can direct our thought to such a diversity of things, including things that do not exist.
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Introduction 1: Intentionality and Intensionality 2: "Something" 3: A Display Theory of Attitude Attribution 4: Nonspecificity 5: Inference 6: Relationality and Representation Flashbacks
A new theory of how our mental states can be about things in the world - and things that are not in the world
Solves puzzles that have been troublesome for hundreds of years
Clearly and elegantly written
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Mark Sainsbury is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was Susan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. He was the editor of Mind from 1990 to 2000. He is author of Russell (1979), Paradoxes (1988), Logical Forms (1991), Departing from Frege (2002), Reference Without Referents (2005), Fiction and Fictionalism (2009), and co-author with Michael Tye of Seven Puzzles of Thought and How to Solve Them (2012).
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A new theory of how our mental states can be about things in the world - and things that are not in the world
Solves puzzles that have been troublesome for hundreds of years
Clearly and elegantly written
Read more
Product details
ISBN
9780198803348
Published
2018
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Weight
400 gr
Height
223 mm
Width
148 mm
Thickness
19 mm
Age
U, P, 05, 06
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
210
Author