Abstract
Review our situation: Part One developed an account of the contents which human thoughts can have. All human contents are generated from basic contents, which consist of phenomenal or causal microevents standing in certain spatio-temporal relations. And basic contents are basic in truth. They either match the world or fail to match the world, and in so doing ground the truth of contents generated from them. It is for this reason that to make sense of something contingent, to show that we can coherently conceive it, is to flesh it out in basic content, to exhibit basic contents which could ground its truth.
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In fact, there are problems with the plausibility of neurons as well, problems with even the apparently plausible resources which Part Two deployed. But let me hold off on that point for a moment.
This is in fact slightly over-simplified. There is a certain sort of degenerate causal basic content which may well still match the world. We will return to this issue in a bit.
One might wonder how these can be distinct. There are some suggestions in section 2.
Paul Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Michael Bishop, “,Theory-Ladenness of Perception Arguments”.
Such a strategy might even help to underwrite the truth of more ordinary speech despite the fact that our experience is seriously false. Perhaps ordinary speech of the spatio-temporal relations of balls and balloons is not so determinate in meaning as to be consistent only with the existence of a classical and continuous spatio-temporal world. Perhaps ordinary speech of the spatial and temporal relations of ordinary concrete objects can be legitimately extended in either a classical or quantum mechanical direction. Perhaps either direction involves some development, but of the kind which led twelfth century talk of addition gradually towards talk of transfinite addition, a development which is a refinement rather than a replacement.
At least if it involves chirality.
See the discussion of Peter Unger’s examples in Chapter Nine.
There are other ways in which non-semantic constitution would be helpful to us. Perhaps even our color experience might match the world, if the phenomenal colors of balls and balloons which we experience (or at least the slightly abstracted colors consistent with the perceptions of all normal humans) might be non-semantically constituted by plausibly objective causal properties.
Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
We could, of course, still treat it differently within the realm of forensic truth, in our coherently conceivable and commonsense, but literally false tale of its realization within the world of forensic truth.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Mendola, J. (1997). Conclusion. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_19
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