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Mental Misrepresentation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

J. Christopher Maloney
J. Christopher Maloney*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona
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Abstract

An account of the contents of the propositional attitudes is fundamental to the success of the cognitive sciences if, as seems correct, the cognitive sciences do presuppose propositional attitudes. Fodor has recently pointed the way towards a naturalistic explication of mental content in his Psychosemantics (1987). Fodor's theory is a version of the causal theory of meaning and thus inherits many of its virtues, including its intrinsic plausibility. Nevertheless, the proposal may suffer from two deficiencies: (1) It seems not to provide an adequate explanation of misrepresentation. (2) It may also fail, as a species of empiricism, to provide a correct explication of the content of observational concepts and those non-observational concepts whose meaning is to be traced to their causal connections with observational concepts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 445 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to Lynne Rudder Baker and Joe Tolliver for helpful discussions and to two anonymous referees for critical commentary.

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