Mental files and shallow pretense
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- A group of philosophers hold that the truth-condition of a belief ascription utterance contains the modes of presentation associated with the singular terms occurring in the complement clause of the uttered sentence. This view is supported by the claim that those modes of presentation are truth-conditionally relevant because the truth-value of a belief ascription utterance is affected by its function of meta-representation, i.e., the representation of how the belief agent presents the object of thought referred to by the used singular terms. However, ordinary people have the intuition that these singular terms are simply about the things to which they refer. It seems that their linguistic understanding is so simple that they do not consciously represent modes of presentation. I argue that we can reconcile the simplicity of linguistic understanding with the meta-representational truth-condition by accepting Crimmin's (1998) theory of shallow pretense. Furthermore, I argue that, by accepting a mental file framework, we can understand modes of presentation as mental files in which pieces of information are stored. In Chapter 1, as a preliminary discussion, I address Evans' (1981, 1982) idea of dynamic Fregean thought. After revealing some problems facing Evans' view, I propose an alternative account that explains the dynamics of modes of presentation in terms of the notion of mental files. In chapter 2, I elaborate the notion of mental files pertaining to the project of providing a general theory of linguistic understanding of the utterances in which singular terms are used. On this notion, mental files are repositories of the pieces of information that have extensional contents, and their roles of mode of presentation are individuated by the information contained in them. In chapter 3, I provide an account of how the standard uses of mental files are extended to the non-standard cases of mental file use, in which we understand singular terms without referents or those which occur in the complement clause of a belief report sentence. Also, I provide a model of linguistic understanding, which I call 'the file-mirroring model', according to which the grasp of the linguistic understanding for successful communication is forming a thought as a mental file structure that contains the contextually salient information that controls one's thoughts. In chapter 4, based on what has been argued in the previous chapters, I argue that Crimmins' theory of shallow pretense supplemented with my mental file account can be effectively defended from the existing criticisms. Shallow pretense is explained in terms of the exploitation of the seeming content of the relevant information. Just as we directly entertain what it appears in experiencing a perceptual illusion even when we know that there is an illusion, we directly entertain the phenomenology of what is shallowly pretended without any imaginative play and any conscious representation of the pretense itself.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Lee, Poong Shil |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Philosophy. |
| Primary advisor | Crimmins, Mark |
| Thesis advisor | Crimmins, Mark |
| Thesis advisor | Hills, David A. (David Allen), 1931- |
| Thesis advisor | Lawlor, Krista |
| Advisor | Hills, David A. (David Allen), 1931- |
| Advisor | Lawlor, Krista |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Poong Shil Lee. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Philosophy. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Poong Shil Lee
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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