David Finkelstein

I seem to attribute thoughts and feelings to myself with more ease, accuracy, and authority than I'm able to attribute them to others. What accounts for this? When philosophers address this and related questions, they are drawn in two directions. In one direction lies what I call 'detectivism'. A detectivist is someone who thinks that the authority which attaches to my mental state avowals is due to my being in an especially good position to find out about my own states of mind. Detectivism stands opposed to 'constitutivism'. A constitutivist thinks that the authority with which I speak about my own states of mind is explained--not by my being especially well-placed to learn about some range of facts, but rather--by its being the case that what I think and feel is constitutively determined by what I judge myself to think and feel. ;Ludwig Wittgenstein has been read as a philosopher who rejects detectivism in favor of constitutivism. In the first two chapters of the thesis, I argue that we should see Wittgenstein as pulling the rug out from under this controversy rather than as taking a side in it. I attempt to show: that neither detectivism nor constitutivism succeeds as an approach to understanding first-person authority; that although detectivism and constitutivism take themselves to be utterly opposed to each other, ultimately they participate in a common error; that Wittgenstein seeks to excavate the error common to detectivism and constitutivism; and that we can make sense of first-person authority by coming to appreciate Wittgenstein's real views about the expressive character of our mental state avowals. ;It emerges in Chapter 1 that an explanation of first-person authority ought to help us to understand what it is for a mental state to be conscious. In Chapter 3, I address this issue by providing an account of unconscious mental states; what's distinctive about conscious states of mind comes into view when we see what is lacking in those that are unconscious. I argue that while any genuinely mental state may be expressed in a subject's behavior, what makes a mental state conscious is that the subject has the capacity to express it simply by avowing it

Focus, Organization, and Content This book, like the first edition, deals with the mass transport processes that take place in living systems, with a focus on the normal behavior of eukaryotic cells and the - ganisms they constitute, in their normal physiological environment. As a consequence of this focus, the structure and content of the book differ from those of traditional transport texts. We do not start with the engineering principles of mass transport (which are well presented elsewhere) and then seek biological applications of these principles; rather, we begin with the biological processes themselves, and then - velop the models and analytical tools that are needed to describe them. This approach has several consequences. First of all, it drives the content of the text in a direction distinctively different from conventional transport texts. This is - cause the tools and models needed to describe complex biological processes are often different from those employed to describe more well-characterized inanimate systems. Many biological processes must still be described phenomenologically, using me- odologies like nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Simple electrical analogs employing a paucity of parameters can be more useful for characterization and prediction than complex theories based on the behavior of more well-defined systems on a laboratory bench. By allowing the biology to drive the choice of analysis tools and models, the latter are consistently presented in the context of real biological systems, and analysis and biology are interwoven throughout.

Present physics is a mix of theories of time, logic, and matter. These may have a common origin in a unitary quantum cosmology founded on process alone. A quantum theory of sets, or something like it, is helpful for such a cosmology, and one is constructed by adding superposition to a slightly reformulated classical set theory. There is an elementary or atomic process in such theories. The size of its characteristic time is estimated from the mass spectrum, although this gives a much larger time than is usually accepted. In a discussion of the foundations of quantum theory, the problem of the collapsing state-vector is attributed to statism, the ideology, alien to quantum theory, that the system under study has a state. The origin of metrical and gauge structure is considered. Using von Neumann's work on the lattices of algebras, we may represent almost any gauge structure by enlarging the ring of c-numbers of quantum theory beyond the complex (or quaternion) field. Ultimately the gauge structure and c-numbers may express a transport relation defined by the discrete network of the world.

At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. This book contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion of expression. What's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge and first-person authority, but also what it is that distinguishes conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the philosophy of mind.