A central task of contemporary analytic philosophy is to develop an understanding of how our minds are
connected to the external (or mind-independent) world. Arising from this task is the need to explain how
thoughts represent things in the world. Giving such an explanation is the central endeavor of this
dissertation—the aim being to contribute to our understanding of what it is for a subject to be thinking of
a particular object. The structure of the dissertation is set, in part, by responding to the commonly held
view that a satisfactory explanation of what it is to think of a particular object can be drawn out of, or
extended from, an explanation of what it is to be referring to that particular object.
Typically, in investigating these matters, it is accepted that there is an explanatory priority of
language over thought. This is the Priority Thesis. Some take the Priority Thesis to reflect an appropriate
methodological strategy. In this form, it implies the methodological point that the best way to describe
thoughts is by describing them as they are expressed in language. Most, however, seem to take the Priority
Thesis to be symptomatic of a substantive, metaphysical truth. This, to put it one way, is that the content
of a thought is paralleled by the content of the associated linguistic expression. I call this the Assumption
of Parallelism. This characterizes what we call Linguistic Turn philosophy (i.e., analytic philosophy).
The body of the dissertation arises out of questioning the extent of the application ofthe Priority
Thesis in developing theories of reference and thought. I call the move of the partial overturning ofthe
Priority Thesis the Linguistic U-Turn. The overall conclusion is that we cannot explain what it is to think
of a particular object by extending explanations of what it is to be referring to that particular object. In
particular, I reject what I call the Causal Theory of Thought—the view that the representational properties
of a thought are explained by the referential properties of the appropriate singular term. My aim, then,
is to show that a popular conviction concerning the representational properties of thoughts about things
in the world is not warranted.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9863 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Fleming, Michael Neil |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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