Peter Carruthers

The present response elucidates, elaborates, and defends the main thesis advanced in the target article: namely, that natural-language sentences play a constitutive role in some human thought processes, and that they are responsible for some of the distinctive flexibility of human thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of conceptual modules. Section R1 clarifies and elaborates this main thesis, responding to a number of objections and misunderstandings. Section R2 considers three contrasting accounts of the mechanism of intermodular integration. Section R3 discusses objections to some of the empirical data supporting my main thesis. Section R4 criticizes some competing theories of the role of language in cognition. And section R5 considers some proposed supplementary cognitive roles that language might play.

The case for anti-realism in the theory of meaning, as presented by Dummen and Wright, 1 is only partly convincing. There is, I shall suggest, a crucial lacuna in the argument, that can only be filled by the later Wittgenstein's following-a-rule considerations. So it is the latter that provides the strongest argument for the rejection of semantic realism.
By 'realism', throughout, I should be taken as referring to any conception of meaning that leaves open the possibility that a sentence may have a determinate truth-value although we are incapable - either in practice or in principle - of discovering what truth-value it has ('the possibility of veritication-transcendence' for short). 2 I shall say nothing further about what an anti-realist semantics might look like, nor about the possible consequences for logic, epistemology and metaphysics, beyond the fact that it must involve the rejection of any such conception of meaning.

The Centered Mind offers a new view of the nature and causal determinants of both reflective thinking and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working-memory system. This system enables sensory images to be sustained and manipulated through attentional signals directed at midlevel sensory areas of the brain. When abstract conceptual representations are bound into these images, we consciously experience ourselves as making judgments or arriving at decisions. However, our amodal propositional attitudes are never actually among the contents of this stream of conscious reflection. Our beliefs, goals, and decisions are only ever active in the background of consciousness, working behind the scenes. They are never themselves conscious.Drawing on extensive knowledge of the scientific literature on working memory and related topics, Carruthers challenges the central assumptions of many philosophers. In addition to arguing that non-sensory propositional attitudes are never conscious, he also shows that they are never under direct intentional control. Written with his usual clarity and directness, The Centered Mind will be essential reading for all philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the nature of human thought processes.

This chapter considers whether any of the inner sense mechanisms that have been postulated to detect and represent some of our own mental states should qualify as sensory modalities. We first review and reject the four standard views of the senses, and then propose a set of properties that would be possessed by a prototypical sensory system. Thereafter we consider how closely the existing models of inner sense match the prototype. Some resemble a prototypical sense to a high degree, some much less so.

Do we think in natural language? Or is language only for communication? Much recent work in philosophy and cognitive science assumes the latter. In contrast, Peter Carruthers argues that much of human conscious thinking is conducted in the medium of natural language sentences. However, this does not commit him to any sort of Whorfian linguistic relativism, and the view is developed within a framework that is broadly nativist and modularist. His study will be essential reading for all those interested in the nature and significance of natural language, whether they come from philosophy, psychology or linguistics.

The paper puts forward the thesis of conceptual pragmatism: that there are pragmatic choices to be made between distinct but similar concepts within various contexts. It is argued that this thesis should be acceptable to all who believe in concepts, whether the believers are platonists, realists or anti-realists. It is argued that the truth of the thesis may help to resolve many long-standing debates, and that in any case it will lead to an extension of philosophical method. The paper then briefly considers the concepts of belief and desire as a case-study, and argues for the recognition of the practical reasoner's stance (to stand alongside Dennett's intentional stance), relative to which we should select concepts of belief and desire which are broadly cartesian.