Abstract

This book contains essays published originally in the last three decades and one paper that appears in print for the first time. They deal with metaphysical, epistemological, and semantical problems concerning knowledge, mind, and reality. The book is mainly focused on “the various kinds of dependencies that might hold between mind and reality” and substantially unified by “consistent commitment to realism”. The essays are arranged thematically into three groups. The first concerns the notion of knowledge in general, the nature of a priori knowledge, and of modality. McGinn favors a version of the reliabilist account of knowledge, for which a belief counts as knowledge if it has been produced by a method leading to true beliefs in a significant number of relevant cases. He proposes to define a priori knowledge as noncausal knowledge and defends a radically nonreductive conception of modality as a mode of property instantiation. The second part contains essays relevant to the theory of mental content, including “The Structure of Content” which, as McGinn suggests, is probably the most widely cited paper he has published. It also includes, among others, a less widely known, but very interesting paper on reference, proposing a plausible alternative to both descriptive and causal theories of reference. The third part contains essays that mainly try to undermine Dummettian semantic antirealism, and argue for realism, irrespective of its epistemological costs. It concludes with two recent essays on color: one defends supervenience of color properties upon dispositional properties of objects, and the other explores consequences of the neutrality of color experience with respect to the ontological nature of color.