Takashi Iida

The author considers three Japanese verbs that may be the counterparts of the English “know” and “believe.” As verbs of thinking, they typically form mental predicates, which are sensitive to the difference in grammatical person in Japanese. He also shows how difference in person is connected to aspectual properties of these verbs. Some Japanese verbs for mental activities may take two sentential complements, one for their objects and the other for their contents. It is argued that the verb _shiru_, a counterpart of “know,” is one such two-complement verb. It is suggested that the object complement of _shiru_ must be a definite noun phrase, and it is the source of the factivity of _shiru_. The two-complement structure of _shiru_ and other Japanese verbs suggests that a mental activity may have its own object, as well as its content, and it is important to consider their relation to each other.

Although logical positivism had been known before World War II, it was introduced into academic philosophy in Japan only after it. In this process, the US philosophers who came to Japan in order to participate in American Studies Seminar played an important role (Section 2). The first generation of Japanese analytic philosophers, who were born in the 1920s and 1930s, began to have some influence in the 1960s, and some of them published original works of high quality in the 1970s. The second generation of analytic philosophers were born in the 1940s and 1950s. They began to teach in the 1970s and 1980s, and went on to publish papers and books in analytic philosophy. For many years, analytic philosophy had been known as kagaku tetsugaku, which may mean either philosophy of science or scientific philosophy. It had been frequently criticized as “non-philosophy.” Analytic philosophy, however, has changed the style of philosophical discussion and made it possible to form a language that is sufficient to express philosophical ideas and arguments in an intelligible way.

(First paragraphs.) — The notion of “mental time” refers to the experience and awareness of time, including that of past, present, and future, and that of the passing of time. This experience and awareness of time raises a number of puzzling questions. How do we experience time? What exactly do we experience when we experience time? Do we actually experience time? Or do we infer time from something in, or some aspect of our experience? And so forth. These and many related questions in the “philosophy of mental time”, the topic of this special issue of the Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, are not purely philosophical questions. Or at least, they are not likely to be satisfactorily answered by philosophers alone. Rather, they also need the input of neuroscientists, psychologists, physicists, linguists, and others. And conversely, answers to these questions may have implications outside the scope of philosophy. The papers in this special issue illustrate this inherent multi- or interdisciplinarity of the philosophy and science of mental time. In this theme introduction, we want to give a few more examples to illustrate this interdisciplinarity, but also to point out that much of the field is still wide open—that is, these illustrations raise more questions than answers.

There are some objects of perception that are either too far from us to touch or that cannot be touched at all. Typical examples are the sky and the various phenomena that appear in the sky such as rainbows and sunsets. This paper is concerned with the ontological status of the rainbow. Does it exist when it is not actually perceived? Does it exist even when it is not possibly perceived? My conclusion is that a rainbow is a physical event, and that, although it is recognized as a rainbow by its characteristic visual appearance, it should not be identified with that appearance. I suggest that the case of the rainbow might give us useful hints for the analysis of secondary qualities like colors and sounds.

There is a widely shared account of the distinction between types and tokens, which might be termed the standard account. However, it has some surprising consequences that are not always realized. According to the standard account, a type is a contingent abstract object that can be created by us, but it does not allow any change and can never be destroyed once it is created, because it is an abstract object. I would like to present an alternative account of types and tokens, according to which types are concrete objects that are located in space and time. This new account is based on a concept that I call a "token generator", which is something that specifies in detail how to produce the tokens.