Andrea Tortoreto

This paper argues that the metarepresentational structure of imagination plays a constitutive, epistemically active role in thought experiments. Against the propositional view defended by Salis and Frigg (2020), according to which only propositional imagination is necessary for performing thought experiments, I maintain that different varieties of imagination, objectual, perceptual, simulative, and affective, are essentially involved in thought experimentation. Drawing on Voltolini’s (2021) metarepresentational theory of fiction, I propose that thought experiments operate through a specific metarepresentational state involving make-beliefs, genuine beliefs entertained in fictional contexts. I defend two connected claims. First, metarepresentation is not merely an enabling background for imaginative engagement in thought experiments: it actively regulates the interface between fictional and real evaluative contexts. Second, this regulatory role becomes visible once we recognize a distinctive failure-mode, metarepresentational collapse, that cannot be captured in terms of incoherence or defective inference. This argument provides independent grounds for recognizing the theoretical autonomy of metarepresentation in the epistemology of thought experiments.

It is well known that Franz Brentano was the first to suggest intentionality, the property of being about something, as a criterion for demarcating the domain of the mental. He suggested that intentionality is a necessary and sufficient condition for something to qualify as a mental event. It is important, for the purposes of this paper, to pay attention to the fact that Brentano’s theory came from within a broader philosophical outlook that was thoroughly dualistic. He sought a total separation of the mental from the physical, and his appeal to intentionality as a defining criterion for the mental is in the service of producing such a separation. In Brentano’s view, only mental events have intentionality, and it is in virtue of this feature that they differ from the events of the physical world. The aim of this paper is to explore whether Brentano’s intentionality criterion for defining the domain of the mental is committed to the broader dualism from which it originated.

The aim of this paper is to propose a reconstruction of Richard Rorty’s philosophy of mind aimed at showing both its systematic structure and the originality of some outcomes, not adequately underlined by critics. My starting point is an early paper, titled Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental, in which Rorty takes sides on the venerable question of the mark of the mental. I will show that Rorty defends a weak view on the above question and that his idea, according to which a particular concept of incorrigibility provides the most promising way of distinguishing the mental from the physical, has a deep influence on Philosophy and the Mirror of the Nature. In the last part of the paper, I will underline the consequences of Rorty’s peculiar idea of the mental on the specific problem of fictional entities, showing how his position could be seen as a form of deflationism which in some ways seems compatible with the positions recently engaged by Crane.