Christopher Peacocke

What is it to be capable of thoughts about an objective world? What is involved in the unity of consciousness? How is the ability to attribute attitudes to other persons to be understood? The three symposia in this volume develop new approaches to these central questions in the philosophy of mind. The contributors include leading philosophers of the middle and younger generation working in Britain. All the issues discussed have an interdisciplinary dimension, and each symposium contains a contribution from a noted psychologist working in the same field. The volume will be of interest not only to philosophers of mind, but also to those concerned with metaphysics, epistemology, developmental pscychology, animal psychology, and the nature of consciousness.

In their searching contributions to this Symposium, Gideon Rosen, Timothy Williamson and Crispin Wright identify a set of issues crucial for assessing the principle-based treatment of modality I presented in Chapter Four of Being Known. I thank them for such focused and thoughtful discussions. This response is organized as a series of questions and proposed answers that aim to address the issues they raise. I hope their contributions will be as helpful to the reader as they have been to me in understanding what is, and what is not, involved in the principle-based conception. My response will not consist only in defense and elaboration. On some issues, I will argue that the position formulated in Being Known needs supplementation. On others, especially those concerned with actualism and possibilia, it needs revision and a new positive theory.

The topic of Being Known is what I call the Integration Challenge, which is the challenge of providing, for any given domain, a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics and epistemology for that domain. In virtually every domain of thought, it is a substantive task to reconcile our metaphysics and our epistemology of that domain. In some cases, we have an intuitively acceptable metaphysics, but cannot find a plausible epistemology which would allow us knowledge of truths for which that is the right metaphysics. In others, the reverse situation obtains. In yet others, we have an intuitive metaphysics and an intuitive epistemology, but cannot see how they are to be reconciled.

Philosophers from Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein to the recent realists and antirealists have sought to answer the question, What are concepts? This book provides a detailed, systematic, and accessible introduction to an original philosophical theory of concepts that Christopher Peacocke has developed in recent years to explain facts about the nature of thought, including its systematic character, its relations to truth and reference, and its normative dimension. Particular concepts are also treated within the general framework: perceptual concepts, logical concepts, and the concept of belief are discussed in detail. The general theory is further applied in answering the question of how the ontology of concepts can be of use in classifying mental states, and in discussing the proper relation between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts. Finally, the theory of concepts is used to motivate a nonverificationist theory of the limits of intelligible thought. Peacocke treats content as broad rather than narrow, and his account is nonreductive and non-Quinean. Yet Peacocke also argues for an interactive relationship between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, and he plots many connections with work in cognitive psychology.

This chapter discusses the Fregean hierarchy of senses. A resolution of issues about the hierarchy of senses turns on the resolution of a series of issues of much wider significance in the theory of thought, in epistemology, in metaphysics, and in the philosophy of mind. The acceptability and nature of a Fregean hierarchy of senses involves the correct way of conceiving of the relation between sense and reference. It involves some conception of how thinkers are capable of thinking of abstract objects like senses and Thoughts. Since the hierarchy in turn bears upon issues about thinking about Thoughts, resolutions of these issues also have ramifications in the philosophy of mind for what is involved in the ascription of attitudes to oneself and to others. Correspondingly, evidence drawn from these various areas is pertinent to the assessment of treatments of the Fregean hierarchy.

This paper presents an account of the understanding of statements involving metaphysical modality, together with dovetailing theories of their truth conditions and epistemology. The account makes modal truth an objective matter, whilst avoiding both Lewisian modal realism and mind-dependent or expressivist treatments of the truth conditions of modal sentences. The theory proceeds by formulating constraints a world-description must meet if it is to represent a genuine possibility. Modal truth is fixed by the totality of the constraints. To understand modal discourse is to have tacit knowledge of the body of information stated in these constraints. Modal knowledge is attained by evaluating modal statements in accordance with the constraints. The question of the general relations between modal truth and knowability is also addressed. The paper includes a discussion of which modal logic is supported by the presented theory of truth conditions for modal statements.

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

It is just over fifty years since the publication of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. That paper expresses a broad vision of the system of relations between meaning, experience, and the rational formation of belief. The deepest challenges the paper poses come not from the detailed argument of its first four sections – formidable though that is – but from the visionary material in its last two sections.1 It is this visionary material that is likely to force the reader to revise, to deepen, or to rethink her position on fundamental issues about the relations between meaning, experience, rationality, and, above all, the a priori. Does what is right in Quine’s argument exclude any rationalist view of these relations? How should a rationalist view be formulated? Those are the questions I will be addressing. I start with the critical part of this task, a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of Quine’s vision. Drawing on the constraints emerging from that critical discussion, I will then turn to the positive task of articulating and defending a rival conception. The rival conception can be described as a Generalized Rationalism