Familiar Mental Phenomena

Abstract

The thesis of Rescher’s Conceptual Idealisn.¹is that fundamental categories we use to organize and express our beliefs about the world, in particular about things which are not minds, are mind-dependent concepts. They are mind-dependent in a stronger sense than the obvious trivial one, namely that it is minds whose knowledge, or putative knowledge, is framed in those concepts. But what stronger sense is involved is less easy to state in a general form, since several different theses are put forward, and the emphasis varies as Rescher treats different individual concepts. I want to explore the varies of mind-involvement Rescher find, the connection between one sort and other sorts, and to raise for each of them the question ‘what sort of self-knowledge is implied by the thesis of conceptual idealism?’