Rusong Huang

A psychological sentence is commonly understood as representing a mental fact. This paper offers an alternative and argues that saying “Someone S is in a mental state M” is saying “There are some circumstances C such that S is in C, and it is rational for anyone in C to behave in a certain way.” To argue for this alternative, the paper appeals to the Sellarsian philosophy of mind but transforms it with a rationality key. Wilfrid Sellars’s view is commonly taken as one of the earliest attempts at today’s so-called Theory Theory view of mentality attributions because Sellars understands our mentality as a theoretical posit. Since the view is unsatisfactory in many ways, the paper argues that (1) we do not have to treat Sellars as a proponent of Theory Theory, and (2) we can appeal to rational relations rather than theories to understand mentality attributions. More specifically, the paper shows how the alternative can be defended for both the phenomenal and intentional types of mentality and how some challenges can be met.

This paper defends the thesis that rationality is essential to mind. I begin by clarifying the notion of rationality, arguing that it should be understood in broad, uncodifiable, and relative terms (the threefold characterization of rationality). Using this clarified conception, I then develop Quine-Davidson’s Argument from Attribution to defend a precise Rationality Requirement: in attributing mental states to a subject S, we must treat S as one of us, namely, as a rational being. Finally, I consider and respond to a range of objections, including the Gap Problem and the Question-Begging Problem, showing that the essential role of rationality in the mind remains robust.

In my dissertation, I argue that psychological sentences are not representational. I call this view Mental Anti-Representationalism (MAR). The meaning of a psychological sentence is commonly understood principally or exclusively in terms of the representational relations between the sentence and what it represents (a fact). MAR rejects it. According to MAR, psychological sentences are categorically different from physical sentences that are representational. My main argument is that psychological sentences are, in fact, rationality sentences, and rationality sentences are not representational; therefore, psychological sentences are not representational. Finally, I apply MAR to address some perennial problems faced by simulationists, expressivists, and physicalists.

In this article, I will introduce the idea of mental anti-representationalism (MAR) that I defended. According to MAR, psychological sentences are not representational. The article has four sections. I will first clarify MAR (“Three Clarifications about the Thesis of MAR”) and explain it with the help of the view of noncognitivism or expressivism in metaethics (“Metaethical Noncognitivism, Expressivism and MAR”). Like noncognitivism, MAR is a negative thesis. However, the positive thesis of MAR is not that psychological sentences express some non-cognitive or desire-like attitudes, but that they are a type of rationality sentence. I will then compare MAR with other views of mind on the market, such as mental eliminativism and mental fictionalism (“Mental Eliminativism, Fictionalism and MAR”). MAR rejects eliminativism and improves fictionalism. Finally, I will outline my main argument for MAR and address some challenges (“My Master Argument Outline and Some Challenges”). My argument relies on the uncodifiability thesis of rationality and my view can avoid what I will call the Question-Begging Problem.

In this paper, I defend an inferentialist account of proper names. After a review of how the account works in the framework of Robert Brandom’s inferentialism, I focus on two objections. The first one, from a Russellian view, is that the inferentialist account will eventually collapse into a Russellian description theory of proper names. The second, from a Millian view, is that the account fails due to the fact that proper names in fact have no conceptual content, as they are merely meaningless tags. I conclude by recapitulating the advantages of the inferentialist account of proper names.