Eros Corazza

Descartes, one of the central figure of the rationalist school, brought to the philosophical forum questions such as “What am I?”, “Does one’s mind differ from one’s body?” and if so, “How does the mind interact with the body?”. The Cartesians observed that some phenomena of nature (e.g. the mastery of language) do not fall within the mechanical philosophy of their time: they thus posited a new entity, the res cogitans (the mind) to account for these phenomena. In rejecting the mechanical philosophy, nowadays rationalists are in a position to deal with Descartes’ traditional questions in a new way. In this Chomsky’s foundational works on language (and the cognitive revolution he initiated) play a central role and welcome new solutions and dissolutions to some traditional philosophical puzzles.

An account of the evaluation of fictional discourse in terms of counterfactuals is sketched which accommodates the insights of D. Lewis and G. Evans but is not committed to the existence of possibilia on the one hand and to taking counterfactuals as barely true on the other hand. By adopting a two-step theory of evaluation which does not evaluate expressions (sentences) across possible worlds modal realism is avoided. And the use of a modified incorporation principle saying that every singular reference made in the scope of a pretence is anaphoric and linked to a quantifier outside the scope allows to incorporate actual individuals within a game of make-believe.

The following thesis will be discussed and defended:An attitude ascription is an empathetic exercise resting on our, more general, imaginative faculty. Sentences of natural language are the best medium we have to classify someone’s mental life.The sentence used to classify one’s mental state is the one the reporter would use to express the attributee’s mental state if the reporter were in the attributee’s situation. A report of the form “A believes/desires/wishes/… that p” captures the attributee’s (A) mental life inasmuch as it conveys the sentence the reporter would use to express her mental state if the latter were in A’s situation.