Language Mind and Logic

This is a collection of eleven original essays in analytical philosophy by British and American philosophers, centring on the connection between mind and language. Two themes predominate: how it is that thoughts and sentences can represent the world; and what having a thought - a belief, for instance - involves. Developing from these themes are the questions: what does having a belief require of the believer, and of the way he or she relates to the environment? In particular, does having a belief require speaking a language? The volume concludes the informal series stemming from the meetings sponsored by the Thyssen Foundation. It will interest analytical philosophers, students doing courses in philosophy of mind within the analytical tradition and philosophically interested researchers in cognitive psychology.

Introduction; 1. Banish disContent Jerry Fodor; 2. Truth conditions: a causal theory Anthony Appiah; 3. Semantic reductionism and methodological solipsism Harold Noonan; 4. Content and context Jeremy Butterfield; 5. Circumstantial attitudes and benevolent cognition John Perry; 6. Replication and functionalism Jane Heal; 7. Anti-realism: cognitive role and semantic content John Skorupski; 8. Privacy and rule-following Edward Craig; 9. Inventing logical necessity Crispin Wright; 10. Intuition in constructive mathematics Charles Parsons; Index of names.

This is a collection of eleven original essays in analytical philosophy by British and American philosophers, centring on the connection between mind and language. Two themes predominate: how it is that thoughts and sentences can represent the world; and what having a thought - a belief, for instance - involves.