Christopher Peacocke

Only computational explanations of a content‐involving sort can answer certain ‘how’‐questions; can support content‐involving counterfactuals; and have the generality characteristic of psychological explanations. Purely formal characteriza‐tions of computations have none of these properties, and do not determine content. These points apply not only to psychological explanation, but to Turing machines themselves. Computational explanations which involve content are not opposed to naturalism. They are also required if we are to explain the content‐involving properties of mental states.

This paper has five theses, which are intended to address the claims in Jerry Fodor's paper. (1) The question arises of the relation between the philosophical theory of concepts and epistemology. Neither is explanatorily prior to the other. Rather, each relies implicitly on distinctions drawn from the other. To explain what makes something knowledge, we need distinctions drawn from the theory of concepts. To explain the attitudes mentioned in a theory of concepts, we need to use the notion of knowledge. (2) Concepts can have a normative dimension without their nature being interpretation‐dependent, and without their nature being mind‐dependent. The normative dimension traces back instead to the role of truth as a constitutive aim of judgement. (3) Conceptual combination is to be explained at the level of reference and semantic value. When we respect this fact, there is no difficulty in explaining compositionality for epistemically‐constrained concepts. (4) Epistemically‐constrained theories of concepts are committed to the applicability of the notion of the a priori. They are not committed to the applicability of the notion of analyticity, where this is construed as truth purely in virtue of meaning or the identity of concepts. (5) Possession of a concept has causal‐explanatory powers, whether given by a possession condition in the form presented in A Study of Concepts, or by possession of an implicit conception. A possession‐condition theory of concepts need not be a form of dispositionalism.

This paper begins by considering Dummett's justificationist treatment of statements about the past in his book Truth and the Past (2004). Contrary to Dummett's position, there is no way of applying the intuitionistic distinction in the arithmetical case between direct and indirect methods of establishing a content to the case of past-tense statements. Attempts to do so either give the wrong truth conditions, or rely on notions not available to a justificationist position. A better, realistic treatment makes ineliminable use of identity of state in its positive account of understanding of the past tense; this account can also be applied to other subject matters besides the past. A theory is developed of how realists should conceive of the relation between meaning and evidence. Points from this discussion are used in criticism of Wright's minimalist conception of truth. Three grades of possible involvement of truth and reference in a substantive theory of intentional content are distinguished, and reasons are given for thinking that a range of contents involve the highest degree of involvement of reference and truth in their substantive individuation.

For a wide range of concepts, a thinker’s understanding of what it is for a thing to fall under the concept plausibly involves knowledge of an identity. It involves knowledge that the thing has to have the same property as is exemplified in instantiation of the concept in some distinguished, basic instance. This paper addresses the question: can we apply this general model of the role of identity in understanding to the case of subjective, conscious states? In particular, can we explain our understanding of what it is for someone else to be in a particular conscious state in terms of our knowledge of the relation of identity which that state bears to some of our own states?[1] This is a large issue, with many ramifications both within and beyond the philosophy of mind; so let me give a map for the route I aim to take. We first need to consider the features of explanations of concepts in terms of identity in domains outside the mental. There are substantial constraints on legitimate explanation of concepts in terms of identity. There are also reasons that it is harder to meet these constraints in the case of concepts of conscious states than it is in other cases. I will go on to suggest a way in which we can overcome the special difficulties of the conscious case, and to try to elaborate the nature both of our understanding of first person applications of concepts of conscious states, and of our grasp of an identity relation applied to these states. A positive account of understanding in this area, as in any other, has to dovetail with a credible epistemology of conscious states in oneself and in others. I will offer something under that head, and say how the resulting position steers a middle way distinct from each of the two classic rival positions on conscious states of the later Wittgenstein on the one hand, and of Frege on the other

This note aims to clarify which arguments do, and which arguments do not, tell against Conceptualism, the thesis that the representational content of experience is exclusively conceptual. Contrary to Sean Kelly’s position, conceptualism has no difficulty accommodating the phenomena of color constancy and of situation-dependence. Acknowledgment of nonconceptual content is also consistent with holding that experiences have nonrepresentational subjective features. The crucial arguments against conceptualism stem from animal perception, and from a distinction, elaborated in the final section of the paper, between content which is objective and content which is also conceived of by its subject as objective