Abstract

The meaning of mental terms and the status of mental entities are core issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is argued that the old Reichenbachian distinction between abstracta and illata might shed new light on these issues. First, it suggests that beliefs, desires and other pro-attitudes that make up the higher mental life are not all equally substantial or real. Second, it conceives the elements of the lower mental life as entities that are inferred from concrete, observable events. As a consequence, it might teach us two lessons: first, to see reliefs in the higher mental map, and second, to acknowledge that qualia are probabilistically inferred rather than directly experienced