Origins of Objectivity
Tyler Burge
Language: English
Pages: 656
ISBN: 0199581398
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Tyler Burge presents a substantial, original study of what it is for individuals to represent the physical world with the most primitive sort of objectivity. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind. Origins of Objectivity illuminates several long-standing, central issues in philosophy, and provides a wide-ranging account of relations between human and animal psychologies.
prevented him from exploiting his insight. 150 Origins of Objectivity It survived the emergence of causal pictures of linguistic reference. It even survived the development of anti-individualism. Individual Representationalism retains a presence in current philosophical work. It guides most philosophical remarks on the problem with which we started determining conditions under which representation of a mind-independent subject matter is possible. In mainstream philosophy in the second half of
comprehensive and sufficiently complex type homogeneous framework of reference. I have claimed that this condition is satisfied in the case of material bodies, and not generally in other cases. But earlier . . . I asserted that a condition, in turn, of the possession of a single, continuously usable framework of this kind, was the ability to reidentify at least some elements of the framework in spite of discontinuities of observation: that is to say, one must be able to identify some particular
of representing is an aspect of the kind of state.11 Such modes of representation constitute the perspective of an animal or person. They mark how the world is, representationally, for an individual. Thus ‘way of representing’ or ‘mode of representation’ indicates both the way that the act, state, event is typed representationally and the way that the act, state, event functions to represent. In cases of representation failure, to be discussed in the next section, there remain ways of
either function to represent as do singular referring contents, attributives, functional representation (the successor of) or operate on representational contents as do logical connectives and quantifiers or are composites of representing representational contents as are whole thoughts.15 Thus a cat is not a representational content. A concept of a sphere, or a perceptual grouping of spheres, is a representational content. A further constitutive role of representational contents was mentioned
contents would solve an abstract computational problem. There are, for example, constraints on causal order, referential and other constraints on the representational content of states, and so on. Few explanations are purely at level (a). Similarly, few explanations are absolutely specific and complete as to either algorithm or exact representational content. Often the specifications of content go only a little beyond ‘as of’ specifications. Thus few explanations are purely at level (b).