Call For Papers: Collective Intentionality

Collective Intentionality VIII University of Manchester August 28-31, 2012 Collective Intentionality VIII – as the name suggests! – is the eighth in a series of large-scale international events on joint and/or cooperative action, reasoning, decision, intention, attention, and associated mental and agential phenomena, topics that impact on issues in ethics …

A Summary of the Imperative Content Strategy

By Manolo Martinez In my last post I was assuming familiarity with something not many people is familiar with. I apologise. Let me say a quick thing about the imperative content strategy to defend representationalism about pain. Before that, representationalism: this is the idea that the phenomenal character of experiences …

Hearing eardrums, a problem for informational semantics?

Over at Brainhammer, Pete Mandik set out the following problems for info-semantics: If it’s determinate specifications you are worried about, it’s worth keeping in mind that causal/informational stories haven’t been without their own problems. Regarding specificity, there are all sorts of problems concerning where in the causal chain to locate …

Semantic properties of mind and language: The Standard View

Which, if any, semantic properties would the utterances of a community of language users have, even if we assumed that the language users had no internal semantic states? My answer will come in multiple posts. Note that by ‘semantic properties’ I mean things like reference, truth, aboutness, and usability-in-an-inference. I will ultimately argue, with a couple of caveats, that their expressions would have a full suite of semantic properties.

In this, the first post in the series, I summarize, defend, and clarify the Standard View of the relationship between the semantic properties of internal states and public linguistic expressions. I’d be interested in comments, as these are ideas I’m slowly developing, and injections of criticism at this early juncture would be most welcome.

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