Joseph Owens

(Book Epsilon): Macroscopic overview -- E 1 (English translation) -- The role of book epsilon in the Metaphysics -- Pure actuality and primacy in being -- Aristotelian sciences and their starting points (E 1.1025b3-1026a23) -- The universality of being qua being -- (Book Zeta): Microscopic investigation -- Z I (English translation) -- The meanings of ousia -- Essential being (to ti en einai) -- "Essential being" and singular thing -- "Essential being" and form -- Form and universal -- Form and cause of being.

Functionalist theories of mind, which individuate mental states in terms of the relationships they bear to each other, to inputs and outputs, are currently much in vogue. This study is primarily concerned with explicating and evaluating such theories. ;Functionalists see themselves as addressing problems which were of concern to logical behaviorists and physicalists, and thus Chapter I is devoted to a brief discussion of these earlier accounts--accounts purporting to provide adequate non-mentalistic conditions for mental states. Both these accounts are now widely regarded as having failed in this endeavour, and the question to be resolved is whether functionalistic accounts fare any better in this regard. ;I consider at length a number of different functionalist approaches, distinguishing, in particular, between a priori functionalist accounts, such as that offered by David Lewis, and empirical functionalism of the kind proposed by Hilary Putnam. I argue that both kinds of functionalism must be rejected in the light of numerous difficulties, and, specifically, that both forms of functionalism are faced with crucial problems in specifying 'inputs' and 'outputs'. In regard to each account I argue that 'inputs' and 'outputs' must be specified in some question-begging fashion or else in a way that leaves the account open to counterexamples. ;In the final chapter I attempt to uncover some very general, if vague, intuitions which seem to motivate and lend credence to such reductive efforts in the philosophy of mind. I argue that functionalism, like behaviorism, is motivated by an over-simplistic view of behavioral terms as 'observational'--a view which fails to do justice to the many complex ways in which psychological considerations enter into our everyday practice of characterizing behavior.

The externalist examples of Burge, Putnam etc. were offered as examples of how it is physically identical twins can differ in mental states such as belief, and little attention was paid to the interpretations the twins impose on their respective acoustic inputs. The received story today is that this form of interpretation—the semantic reading one assigns the sounds one hears—is the product of inference. The problem for this inferential model is simple to state: though the twins are physical doppelgangers and don't differ in their acoustic inputs, they differ in the interpretations they impose on their respective inputs. I argue that the inferential model does not allow for how it is the twins arrive at these different interpretations. And, since the externalist examples are compelling, this tells against the inferential model

Psychological externalism is the thesis that the contents of many of a person's propositional mental states are determined in part by relations he bears to his natural and social environment. This thesis has recently been thrust into prominence in the philosophy of mind by a series of thought experiments due to Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. Externalism is a metaphysical thesis, but in this work I investigate its implications for the epistemology of the mental. I am primarily concerned with the question whether externalism undermines the idea that a person typically knows the contents of her own thoughts, beliefs, and other propositional attitudes directly and authoritatively. I criticize arguments that have been advanced on behalf of a positive answer to this question, and argue that they rest on a faulty conception of the nature of first person authority, one which likens our access to our own minds to perception. An account of the basis of first person authority is sketched that locates our epistemic right to our self-ascriptions of propositional attitude not in our ability to discriminate among the various thought contents we might be thinking, but rather in our ability to express our thoughts, and to think with them in accordance with the norms of rationality. I consider also the question whether first person authority and externalism jointly make possible a refutation of certain forms of global skepticism, as has been famously argued by Putnam. I argue that Putnam's attempted refutation fails, because the crucial externalist claims that drive it are not knowable a priori

My primary goal in this paper is to focus attention on a certain conception of internal access, on the Cartesian conception that a rational subject's capacity to determine sameness and difference in explicit propositional attitudes is independent of knowledge of the external world. This conception of introspection plays a crucial, if unacknowledged, role in numerous arguments and theoretical positions. In particular, it plays a large role in motivating psychological internalism. I argue in favor of rejecting this epistemology and the internalism it supports

There is a growing acceptance of the idea that the explanatory states of folk psychology do not supervene on the physical. Even Fodor (1987) seems to grant as much. He argues, however, that this cannot be true of theoretical psychology. Since theoretical psychology offers causal explanations, its explanatory states must be taxonomized in such a way as to supervene on the physical. I use this concession to invert his argument and cast doubt on the received model of folk psychological explanation as causal explanation by intentionally individuated states. This in turn undermines the central model of cognitive theory--causal explanation by representational states