Morris's bold venture merits careful attention ... This book is like a breath of fresh air in the face of sterile and reductive neo-functional accounts of content. It captures the insight that human psychology is adapted to tracking human and social responses to the world rather than forging some individualistic extension-response based path through it ... I find Morris's views and arguments deeply congenial. His book is, I believe, essential reading for those wanting seriously to engage with current controversies in the philosophy of mind and content and to examine their impact on our epistemology.

Philosophical Investigations

This book provides a radical alternative to naturalistic theories of content, and offers a new conception of the place of mind in the world. Confronting head-on the scientific conception of the nature of reality that has dominated the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, Michael Morris here presents a detailed analysis of content and propositional attitudes, based on the idea that truth is a value. In the course of this analysis, he rejects the causal theory of the explanation of behaviour and replaces it with an alternative which depends upon a rich conception of the behaviour we explain with reference to states of mind. According to the theory presented here, our understanding of other people is inextricably involved with our evaluation of what they do, and the objectivity of truth depends on the objectivity of moral goodness. Dr Morris's lucid and detailed exposition of his controversial argument sounds an emphatic challenge to the naturalistic orthodoxy in areas as diverse as metaphysics, ethics, and cognitive science.
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Confronting the scientific conception of the nature of reality, Michael Morris suggests that we can only make sense of concept-possession, belief and truth from within a perspective which counts values in general, and moral goodness in particular, as part of the world.
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Notational conventions. Part 1 Metaphysics and content: philosophical theories and metaphysical schemes; conceptualism is Kantian; informativeness; scientism; a proposal for a scientific metaphysics. Part 2 The shape of a theory of content: what is a theory of content?; unified externalism; the explanation of behaviour. Part 3 An evaluative theory of content: the core of a theory; intrinsic assessability; truth and virtue; understanding people; word-meaning and opacity.
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`Morris's bold venture merits careful attention ... This book is like a breath of fresh air in the face of sterile and reductive neo-functional accounts of content. It captures the insight that human psychology is adapted to tracking human and social responses to the world rather than forging some individualistic extension-response based path through it ... I find Morris's views and arguments deeply congenial. His book is, I believe, essential reading for those wanting seriously to engage with current controversies in the philosophy of mind and content and to examine their impact on our epistemology.' Philosophical Investigations
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780198239444
Publisert
1992
Utgiver
Oxford University Press
Vekt
586 gr
Høyde
224 mm
Bredde
145 mm
Dybde
25 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
352

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