Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;We find ourselves in a world not of our own making; and in acquiring knowledge about the world and our situation in it we have nothing to go on but our psychological states; they are the immediate given. Let us label this claim the Basic Datum. What I shall call the Minimal Constraint is the claim, 'An account of the states of mind of subjects credited with knowledgeable thoughts about a mind-independent world must show how the intrinsic properties of such states of mind could yield such knowledge'. That is, a theory of thought must explain the Basic Datum. ;The Basic Datum may seen an obvious truism, and so too may the Minimal Constraint. But if 'obvious' means 'undisputed', neither of these claims is that. First, to say that is acquiring knowledge about the world we are restricted to the immediate deliverances of our psychological states, is to make a major concession to a central plank in the sceptic's argument against the possibility of knowing a mind-independent world. Many think that to deny the sceptic's conclusion we must reject this claim. Causal theories of reference, theories of direct acquaintance and so forth are often formulated with this aim in mind. ;Secondly, the Basic Datum is formulated from the first person perspective; as is the Minimal Constraint. Adoption of this perspective is necessary for generating scepticism; and many think that in order to rebut scepticism we must abandon the first person perspective when explaining the nature of knowledge. A fortiori, they hold that an explanation of the nature of a subjects psychological states when thinking knowledgeable thoughts about the world should not be constrained by questions raised from the first person perspective. ;Doubts of the first kind about the validity of the Constraint fall under what I shall call the Reference Debate; and doubts of the second kind under what I shall call the Reflectivity Debate. Throughout I shall be concerned with these debates as they apply to the phenomenology of experience-embedded thoughts, where by phenomenology I mean no more than the intrinsic properties of the state of mind of subjects credited with such thoughts. More specifically, I shall focus on the state of mind corresponding to the demonstrative component in experience-embedded thoughts expressible by such utterances as, "This is square". I shall refer to such states of mind as 'demonstrative states of mind'; and to experience-embedded thoughts containing a demonstrative component as 'demonstrative thoughts'. All my examples will be of vision-based demonstrative thought, but nothing is supposed to hang on this