Melinda Hogan

There is a question how a causal approach to explaining the representational powers of belief can work together with a view according to which beliefs have truth conditions determined by their logical form. In Chapter I, I point out that truth makers of representations should not be language dependent entities if the aim is to show how representation is possible. I introduce a causal account of belief as being the kind of account which can comply with this. ;I examine features of a view according to which language is essential to belief. An argument for the view that beliefs must have a language like structure is the argument from the possibility of rationality. I argue that on one interpretation of the view in question, this is not the kind of thing that avoids Humean associationism and puts reason into the thought. ;I find that a causal account of the referents of terms in a mental sentence is not a workable causal approach to belief. I show how causal atomism contrasts with other theories and what other kind of causal account of belief you could have. ;In Chapter V I examine a particular causal account of representation, that of Stampe's, treating it as an example of a nonatomistic account of belief. I show how such a view responds to the problem of false belief. I argue that the general form of answer the causal theory gives is the same that certain noncausal theories give. ;I turn to the question what it would be for a belief to have semantic complexity on a causal account. On one way in which a belief could have semantic complexity--by representing more than one object--there is an apparent problem. Assumptions about the epistemology of representation and assumptions about the relation the form a belief takes to what it represents appear to lead to the conclusion that only true beliefs can have semantic complexity. I suggest one possible way out of this problem.

This book contains a defense of representationalism—the thesis that all mental facts are representational facts. Some mental facts—such as facts about what a person believes—seem obviously to be representational facts—that is, facts about how things are represented to be. Other mental facts—such as certain facts about the character of sense experience, for example the painfulness of pain, or the fact that one’s knowledge of it is immediate and authoritative— seem less obviously to be facts about how things are represented to be. In this book, Dretske takes on the task of explaining in representational terms such features as the qualitative nature of sense experience and the source of the special authority we have about our own minds.

Kant and the Mind is for philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists as well as Kant scholars. Brook's central claim is that Kant's discoveries have not been assimilated in current theorizing about the mind, much less superseded. Of course, Kant's general framework has affinities with contemporary functionalism and representationalism. What Brook shows is that more specific Kantian themes and arguments can continue to bear fruit. These include Kant's account of synthesis--the tying of elements together into a single representation, his account of the unity of consciousness, and most centrally, Kant's account of apperceptive self-awareness.

There is a parallel between Plato's argument for the forms at 74b7-c5 in the Phaedo and Frege's argument for the claim that proper names express senses. There is also, I claim, an important asymmetry. The asymmetry explains why it is consistent to accept the conclusion of the Phaedo argument without accepting the conclusion of Frege's argument. The Phaedo argument turns on the possibility of a specific kind of mistaken judgement that may be termed "brute error". Frege's argument does not so depend on the possibility of brute error.