Abstract
5.1 Why a thought is invisible for Frege: Travis on the abstractedness that can be extracted from our “representing-as”—Thoughts and concepts: the “conceptual” as a referential domain, which does not possess the objectivity of the “non-conceptual”—The intermediation made by the “representing-as” as a form of judging—Travis’ rejection of any internalism—Reassessing psychologism: Russell ’s criticism of Frege’s conception of thought—Travis’ suggestion of a Wittgensteinian view that takes into account the sociability of thinking. 5.2 Travis’ reluctance in admitting unthought thoughts beyond the workings of language—Problems of perception: perceptive presentations and representations—The case of analogical, non-perceptive representations—Language and thought reconsidered—Frege on fictional and real thoughts: a problem of modality—The anonymous character of thought. 5.3 Aquinas and the recognition that there are truths which escape our attention—Knowing and guessing: the transcendental impossibility of representing what we do not know—Scientific predictableness—Aquinas’ two kinds of intellection: “divine” and “human”—Distinction between actual and potential knowledge—The peril of determinism.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In a previous work, Travis had already observed, amongst other similar passages: “The nonconceptual for the conceptual to reach to is just that which the world supplies” (2011: 276).
- 3.
Russell ’s 1905 “theory of denoting” is a consequence of this criticism, with Russell rejecting the endorsement of Frege’s view in the first appendix to The Principles of Mathematics, originally published in 1903, and stating that “denoting phrases never have any meaning in themselves”, that “there is no meaning, and only sometimes a denotation” (1994: 416 and 419, n. 10).
References
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Venturinha, N. (2018). Unthought Thoughts. In: Description of Situations. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00154-4_5
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