A Slim Book about Narrow Content

A Slim Book about Narrow Content
Author: Gabriel M. A. Segal
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2000-06-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780262264563

A good understanding of the nature of a property requires knowing whether that property is relational or intrinsic. Gabriel Segal's concern is whether certain psychological properties—specifically, those that make up what might be called the "cognitive content" of psychological states—are relational or intrinsic. He claims that content supervenes on microstructure, that is, if two beings are identical with respect to their microstructural properties, then they must be identical with respect to their cognitive contents. Segal's thesis, a version of internalism, is that being in a state with a specific cognitive content does not essentially involve standing in any real relation to anything external. He uses the fact that content locally supervenes on microstructure to argue for the intrinsicness of content. Cognitive content is fully determined by intrinsic, microstructural properties: duplicate a subject in respect to those properties and you duplicate their cognitive contents. The book, written in a clear, engaging style, contains four chapters. The first two argue against the two leading externalist theories. Chapter 3 rejects popular theories that endorse two kinds of content: "narrow" content, which is locally supervenient, and "broad" content, which is not. Chapter 4 defends a radical alternative version of internalism, arguing that narrow content is a variety of ordinary representation, that is, that narrow content is all there is to content. In defending internalism, Segal does not claim to defend a general philosophical theory of content. At this stage, he suggests, it should suffice to cast reasonable doubt on externalism, to motivate internalism, and to provide reasons to believe that good psychology is, or could be, internalist.

Anti-individualism and Knowledge

Anti-individualism and Knowledge
Author: Jessica Brown
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2004
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780262524216

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind

Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind
Author: William Child
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 1996
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198236255

William Child examines two central ideas in the philosophy of mind, and argues that (contrary to what many philosophers have thought) an understanding of the mind can and should include both. These are causalism, the idea that causality plays an essential role in our understanding of the mental; and interpretationism, the idea that we can gain an understanding of belief and desire by considering the ascription of attitudes to people on the basis of what they say and do.

Pataphilology

Pataphilology
Author: Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1947447815

What do the bizzare etymologies of Jean-Pierre Brisset, made-up languages for literary fiction, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Latin grammarians, Horace's Epodes, and the Papyrus of Ani have in common? Nothing! Taken together they provide an unusually coherent picture of a hitherto unacknowledged non-tradition of linguistic investigation. If pataphysics is the science of the singular, the unparallelled, the exception that has no rule, pataphilology is what gets it there, the singularity of singularities. It is the mode in which exceptions become exceptional, itself an unrepeatable intervention in the language. - Back cover.

Nietzsche and Metaphysics

Nietzsche and Metaphysics
Author: Peter Poellner
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2000
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780198250630

Peter Poellner offers a comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing on his published works and his largely unpublished voluminous notebooks.

Words Without Meaning

Words Without Meaning
Author: Christopher Gauker
Publisher: Christopher Gauker
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262072424

A critique of, and alternative to, the received view of linguistic communication.