I argue that a dilemma arises for naturalistic philosophers of mind in the naturalised semantics tradition. Giving a naturalistic account of the mind is a pressing problem. Brentano’s Thesis — that a state is mental if, and only if, that state has underived representational content — provides an attractive route to naturalising the mental. If true, Brentano’s Thesis means that naturalising representation is sufficient for naturalising the mental. But a naturalist who accepts Brentano’s Thesis thus commits to an eliminativism about (...) the category of the mental. This is because naturalistic theories of representation are reductive, and so over-generalise by applying to patently non-mental states. According to these theories, it has been argued, phenomena like tree rings and saliva come out as representational. Only proposing further Naturalistic conditions on representation could avoid the eliminativist conclusion. But this shows that Naturalists have made only limited progress towards naturalising the mental. And if a Naturalist rejects Brentano’s Thesis, then she gives up on a clear link between representation and mentality. Hence, it is incumbent on the Naturalist to propose another, naturalistically acceptable, mark of the mental. This, again, shows that Naturalists have made only limited progress on the issue of naturalising the mental.Keywords: Intentionality, representation, physicalism, eliminativism, Brentano, materialism, naturalism. (shrink)

This book shows that the semantic analysis of modal notions of possibility and necessity can be used to enhance our understanding of the interpretation of reports of belief or emotional state. It introduces intuitive notation and terminology to express ideas in modern theories of modal interpretation that are normally represented in complex logical formulas, effectively updates the 1960s-era link between possible worlds and the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions, and reconciles two disparate views of the role of events in semantic (...) interpretation, that of Donald Davidson and that of David Lewis. It reduces a host of variable behaviors of propositional attitude ascription to an intuitive and precise distinction between ascriptions that merely express a commitment to propositional content versus ones that attribute a mental state to the holder of the propositional attitude. This leads to an explanation of the nature and effects of the language disorder of fluent aphasia. (shrink)

This paper investigates reference to clausally introduced entities and proposes an explanation for why these are more readily available to immediate subsequent reference with a demonstrative pronoun than with the personal pronoun,it. New evidence is provided supporting proposals that such entities are typically activated, but not brought into focus, upon their introduction into a discourse. The study also provides further insight into the role of information structure, lexical semantics, presuppositional contexts, and syntactic structure in bringing an entity into focus of (...) attention. (shrink)