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COLLOQUIA & CONFERENCES
Edward N. Zalta Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University April 15, 2004 Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm Nursing, Room 127 To give a naturalized account of such claims as "Mental state S is about object x", "Mental state S represents the property F", and "Mental state S has the content that p", there are two tasks that have to be accomplished: (1) give a natural account of the relations about, represents, and has the content, and (2) give a natural account of the entities x, F, and p. The latter is not so easy to do when x doesn't exist or is abstract, when F is a property which is complex or has no instances, or when p is a proposition or state of affairs which is complex or is (necessarily) false. In this paper, I focus on the second task involved in naturalizing the mind and propose that the way to naturalize the problematic entities is by way of a new interpretation of the formal principles which assert their existence. These formal principles are comprehension principles which assert the existence of abstract objects corresponding to certain expressible conditions in a formal language. If we reinterpret the principles as asserting the existence of patterns of properties (i.e., conceive of abstract objects as patterns of properties), then a path opens up to the naturalization of abstract objects. I travel down this path and explore its consequences. The most interesting consequence is that a certain Wittgensteinian view of meaning becomes wedded to some formal metaphysical machinery. The result is that the former is made more precise and the latter is made acceptable to the naturalist.  |
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Last updated 4/8/08 10:32 PM
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