Words without Meaning is part of an ongoing effort by Christopher Gauker to give discursive norms pride of place over traditional relations of intentionality, representation, and meaning. In this book, he has a negative goal and a positive one. Negatively, he aims “to instill a sense of despair concerning the prospects” for making sense of the idea that brain states have propositional content. “The received view” is his collective term for theories that do treat beliefs as something like brain s…
Read moreWords without Meaning is part of an ongoing effort by Christopher Gauker to give discursive norms pride of place over traditional relations of intentionality, representation, and meaning. In this book, he has a negative goal and a positive one. Negatively, he aims “to instill a sense of despair concerning the prospects” for making sense of the idea that brain states have propositional content. “The received view” is his collective term for theories that do treat beliefs as something like brain states with propositional content. Positively, Gauker’s goal is to provide a theory that dispenses with received intentional relations and does all the work that the received view is supposed to do.
