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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Thinking about Things

Thinking about Things

Sainsbury, Mark

Hardcover

PhilosophyLinguistics

ISBN10: 0198803346
ISBN13: 9780198803348
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jul 24 2018
Pages: 210
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.60
Language: English
In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Austin, from apples to unicorns, from former president Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus.

How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? They are not there to be thought about, yet we think about them just as easily as we think about things that do exist.

Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve nonexistent things.

The explanation centers on a new theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve nonexistent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannot always substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Mark Sainsbury's new theory, display theory, explains these anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attribution depends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking.

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